The Court held that s 155(3) of the Duties Act 1997 (NSW) requires aggregation of all acquisitions in the same landholder during the 3-year statement period when calculating landholder duty on a relevant acquisition in a private landholder, irrespective of whether the landholder was a public landholder at the time of the prior acquisition. The words 'other acquisitions during the statement period' in ss 155(1) and 155(3) refer to acquisitions in the landholder entity without any temporal requirement that the landholder be classified as private at the time of each prior acquisition. The Court further held that the resulting duty — charged at the general rate on the aggregated 95.26% interest rather than at the 10% concessional rate that would have applied to a single acquisition in a public landholder — was neither unjust nor unreasonable so as to enliven the s 163H discretion, because the outcome reflected the intended operation of Ch 4 and the taxpayer's own commercial structuring decisions.
The full text is available to signed-in members.