I have seen examples of registrations of foreign usufructuary dismemberments being “successfully” -forgive the irony- registered on the TRS without there being any need or obligation to do so, thus placing the nus-propriétaires in extreme difficulty.
These fall outside the definition of a foreign trust under the Recognition of Trusts Act 1987 and were never contemplated as doing so under the preliminary works of the Hague Convention. There is no trust involved and normally no “burden or charge” under s.43(2) a), b) and c) IHTA 1984 which could possibly justify such a misplaced attempt at compliance security. The Scottish Proper Liferent is one example of how easily the law can be fouled up by over-imaginative interpretative extension of statute, in that case by HMRC. The Law Draftsman only dug the Treasury out of that by the drafting expedient of treating the deed creating one as constituting a settlement - without troubling himself to change the definition of settled property to include them. That would have been nigh impossible give the chasm between the civil law and the English law of property.
Pascal Saint Amand is probably turning in his wave at this unwarranted extension of the trust régime to usufructs - according to social media he surfed at Biarritz… see Is the declaration of foreign usufructuary dismemberments as trusts on the HMRC Trust Register, correct, necessary or even law-abiding?.
Peter Harris