Dearly departed

This article primarily concerns the impact of death: the dead can’t speak for themselves so it’s about time that someone spoke out on their behalf. And when it comes to the venture capital schemes there is more to dying than might appear at first sight.

The state often “robs” deceased venture capitalists (or to be more precise the deceased’s beneficiaries) of a valuable tax break lawfully promised to the deceased in his lifetime.

To see how this robbery takes place it is necessary to devote a little time to exploring the background to some of the venture capital schemes by which I mean:

• the enterprise investment scheme (EIS);
• share loss relief (SLR); and
• the venture capital trust scheme (VCT).

For the sake of brevity I have ignored the seed enterprise investment scheme...