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Thousands of families face paying DOUBLE inheritance tax as HMRC cracks down | Personal Finance | Finance
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HMRC issued a hefty £2.28million worth of IHT penalties in the 2022/23 financial year, an increase of more than a third on the year before. In two years, the taxman’s take from IHT penalties has increased by more than half, according to a freedom of information request by NFU Mutual. So make sure you don’t get caught.
IHT is complex and it is all too easy to find yourself penalised, said Sean McCann, chartered financial planner at NFU Mutual. “HMRC normally issues penalties to families who either undervalue the assets being passed down or fail to include them on their IHT return.”
Families have to calculate how much IHT they owe and pay up within six months of the family member’s death. Otherwise they are charged interest on any money due.
A major problem is that it can take a lot longer than that to sell a property, especially today, and it’s hard to work out the true value until it is sold, leading to errors.
It may be wise to err on the side of caution. If you sell the property for less than you anticipated, which is more likely to happen today as house prices fall, you should be able to claim back any IHT overpayment.
The size of the penalty HMRC imposes on IHT miscalculations will depend on the nature of the error and whether someone deliberately set out to avoid paying tax due.
If the family failed to take “reasonable care” the penalty can be up to 30 percent of the unpaid tax, McCann said. “This regularly happens where families do not get professional valuations for property or other valuable assets, and understate their value as a result.”
If HMRC decides the family made a “deliberate” decision to provide incorrect information or fail to include assets on their IHT return, the tax penalty can rise to a punitive 70 percent.
It gets worse if HMRC decides you were hiding something. “Taking steps to hide errors is likely to be viewed as ‘deliberate and concealed’ and attracts a penalty of up to 100 percent,” McCann added.
In other words, you will pay twice the tax due.
Getting away with tax fraud is harder than ever thanks to HMRC Connect, a data mining computer system that cross-references people’s tax records with other databases to establish fraudulent or undisclosed activity.
This holds a staggering 55billion data items and it’s growing all the time. It covers everything from Land Registry property sales data to bank and credit card transactions, DVLA records and even your emails, social media posts and internet browsing history.
HMRC can reference this against the information on your IHT return, McCann said: “As latest figures show, HMRC does not hold back where it suspects underpaid tax.”
IHT rules are riddled with quirks and complexities so make sure you understand them in detail and seek advice if unsure.
Gifts to loved ones are typically free of IHT provided you live for another seven years, but there are exceptions to this rule.
For example, if you gift a property to your children but continue living there without paying a market rent, it could still incur an IHT charge.
The same applies if you have regular overnight stays. It could even be liable for IHT if you nip round and borrow books from the property more than five times a year, in a particularly bizarre tax rule.
READ MORE: 10 ‘clever’ tips to avoid inheritance tax trap and pass on more to loved one
If you sell a property to a child at a reduced price, the difference between the sale price and market value is seen as a gift under IHT rules. So it may incur tax if you die within seven years.
In another bizarre rule, after gifting a car, you cannot accept more than three lifts a month in the vehicle otherwise it may become liable to IHT.
The payout from any life insurance policies may also be liable, unless they were put in trust. Many don’t realise this and face a huge shock.
Trusts also have pitfalls, though. Many wrongly assume assets held in trust are exempt from IHT but that only applies if you survive for seven years after gifting them (and in some cases 14 years).
HMRC netted a record £7.1billion of IHT last year and is on course to harvest £8billion in the current tax year.
The basic nil-rate threshold has now been frozen at £325,000 since 2009, catching more families as asset values rise in a process known as fiscal drag.
Stephen Lowe, group communications director at retirement specialist Just Group, said too many families fail to take advantage of IHT gifting allowances. “As HMRC rakes in more cash plan ahead to reduce your liability.”
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Reliance Intelligence To Make AI Dramatically More Affordable In India By 2030: Akash Ambani
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Reliance will upend the economics of artificial intelligence by making the technology “dramatically more affordable for every Indian” by the end of the decade, mirroring Jio’s past success in bringing a mobile data revolution, Jio Platforms’ managing director, Akash Ambani, said on Friday.
Reliance is building AI for India, AI by India and AI that will one day serve the world, Ambani said, speaking at the 49th Annual General Meeting of Reliance Industries.
To overcome the biggest hurdle for AI in India today – the scarcity and high cost of compute – Reliance Intelligence is building India’s sovereign AI backbone in Jamnagar, he said.
“Just as Jio made data extremely affordable for every Indian, Reliance Intelligence will disrupt AI economics by making it dramatically more affordable for every Indian by the end of this decade,” Ambani said.
He said that the company’s new deep-tech unit, Reliance Intelligence, will commission an initial 120-megawatt artificial intelligence infrastructure project in Jamnagar, Gujarat, by the end of 2026.
“This cutting-edge infrastructure will be powered entirely by clean energy from Reliance’s own solar generation from the Kutch renewable platform. The first 120 megawatts will be commissioned by the end of 2026,” he promised.
An initial fleet of advanced NVIDIA GB300 GPUs is being operationalised, he informed.
“This next-generation compute capacity is equivalent to more than 75,000 H100 GPUs on an AI-inference basis. As the first 120 megawatts becomes fully operational, this capacity can scale to over two lakh H100-equivalent GPUs,” Ambani said.
The sheer scale of this capacity places Reliance among the largest AI infrastructure platforms being built anywhere in the world, he said, observing: “When compute becomes affordable, innovation becomes inevitable.”
The digital arm of Reliance Industries is anchoring its strategy on global partnerships, deepening its collaboration with Alphabet’s Google and Meta Platforms.
“No company, however large, can build the future alone. The right path is to combine the best global technologies with Indian execution, Indian infrastructure, Indian domain knowledge, and India-first governance,” he said.
The Google partnership has deepened into a truly AI-first collaboration, he said, adding that for hundreds of millions of Jio users, Google AI Pro, powered by Gemini, is already accessible free of cost.
“Our second major partnership is the joint venture with Meta, which operationalises the LLaMA open-source AI for Indian enterprises,” he said.
Reliance Intelligence will deliver sovereign hosting within India, with full model transparency and portability, allowing every enterprise to own its AI journey.
Reliance is building its AI systems designed to be accessible across 22 local Indian languages to serve diverse demographics, ranging from regional students to farmers.
The company plans to deploy these capabilities through a suite of targeted applications, including ‘JioBharatIQ’, ‘AI Vyapar’, and specialised tools for healthcare, education, and agriculture.
ALSO READ: Reliance Announces Jio TeleFrame Smart Home Device With AI-Powered Agents
“Each of these services is designed around one simple principle – AI must be easy to use, trusted to rely on and affordable for all. Together these platforms will create a scalable foundation for consumers, enterprise and government AI services,” he said.
On the AI “unmistakable” transformation within Reliance, Ambani said
Artificial Intelligence is currently being used for network management at Jio, supply chain and merchandising optimisation at Reliance Retail, and enabling multi-lingual content creation at its media unit, JioStar.
In its core oil-to-chemicals (O2C) business, the company has deployed AI-driven process optimisation to boost yields and reduce energy consumption.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Who’s Andy Burnham? ‘King Of The North’ Seen Potential UK PM Amid Doubts On Starmer’s Future
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Following last month’s disappointing council election results, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced pressure from his own party to resign. Meanwhile, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham announced an ambitious plan of his own: to secure a parliamentary seat in the northern English constituency of Makerfield.
On Thursday, Burnham easily won a crucial by-election, opening the door for him to run against Starmer for the leadership of the Labour Party and the United Kingdom. Burnham defeated his closest opponent, Robert Kenyon, the anti-immigration Reform UK candidate, according to early Friday voting results.
Despite concerns that Reform would fight hard, Burnham received 24,927 votes, defeating Kenyon by 9,231 votes. The far-right party finished a solid second in the most recent national election in 2024. It overtook Labour in all eight of Makerfield’s municipal seats last month, according to a report by Al Jazeera.
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Now that the preliminaries have been completed, Burnham can concentrate on his true goal of becoming prime minister. Starmer is the least popular prime minister since polling started in the late 1970s, according to Ipsos.
One of the party’s most well-liked MPs, Burnham is a soft-left candidate from outside the London political establishment and is referred to in the media as the “King of the North”.
Burnham was born into a working-class family; his mother, Eileen, worked as a hospital receptionist, while his father was a telephone engineer for British Telecom. The village of Culcheth, which is situated between Manchester and Liverpool, is where he grew up. Burnham was the first person in his family to attend college, along with his siblings, and he studied English at Cambridge University.
Burnham relishes his outsider status, as evidenced by the numerous northern colloquialisms in his speech. However, he has also been a well-known member of both the opposition and the front bench of Labour.
Before being elected mayor of Manchester in 2017, he held positions as chief secretary to the Treasury and then secretary of state for health under Gordon Brown, where he was directly involved in handling the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the discussions surrounding NHS reform during a time of reduced public spending. Additionally, he ran for the party’s leadership twice.
First, he entered the race in 2010 after Gordon Brown resigned in the wake of Labour’s defeat in the general election, but he finished fourth behind Ed Miliband. When Ed Miliband resigned in 2015, Jeremy Corbyn emerged victorious.
When he was culture secretary in 2009, he started to lose faith in traditional politics. He was heckled at an event commemorating the anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster, which claimed the lives of 97 Liverpool supporters 20 years prior. This led to a call for an investigation.
Even though his break with the political establishment appeared to be final, his subsequent position as mayor has garnered praise from both supporters and onlookers.
Burnham has concentrated on extending devolved powers for the city region, including more control over transportation, housing, and funding for skills, from his victory in 2017 until his re-elections in 2021 and 2024. Along with attempts to address homelessness, his term has also seen the adoption of bus franchising reforms and the so-called Bee Network, which aims to restore public control over services.
His high-profile disputes with Westminster during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially regarding financing for local restrictions in Greater Manchester, led some media outlets to refer to him as the “King of the North”. This nickname initially surfaced in jest in 2020, but as his national profile has increased, it has come to be taken more seriously.
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Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has called for a far harsher response against Lebanon after the Israeli military announced that four soldiers were killed in combat with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
In a post on X, Ben Gvir said, “For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn.”
The far-right minister argued that Israel should prioritise the security of its citizens and military personnel above all other considerations.
“With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit,” he wrote.
“Our supreme duty is to protect the citizens of Israel and the soldiers of the IDF, and this commitment takes precedence over every other consideration.”
על כל דמעה של אמא ישראלית, אלף אמהות לבנוניות צריכות לבכות. לבנון כולה צריכה לבעור!
עם כל הכבוד לאמריקאים, ישראל חייבת להבהיר לעולם כולו שדם בנינו וביטחון אזרחנו איננו הפקר. לבנון כולה צריכה לבעור. חובתנו העליונה היא להגן על אזרחי ישראל ועל חיילי צה״ל, והמחויבות הזו קודמת לכל…
— איתמר בן גביר (@itamarbengvir) June 19, 2026
Ben Gvir also criticised what he described as restrained military responses, saying, “Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint—you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.”
The comments came after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reported that four soldiers were killed “in combat” when their tank was struck during an operation near Kfar Tebnit in southern Lebanon.
The military identified one of the fatalities as Lt. Col. Dor Gedalia Ben Simhon, 32, commander of the 52nd Battalion of the 401st Armored Brigade.
ALSO READ: Will US-Iran Deal Hold? Israel Launches Fresh Offensive On Lebanon, 16 Killed In Nabatieh
Separately, the IDF alleged fresh ceasefire violations by Hezbollah, saying an explosive drone impact in southern Lebanon severely injured an Israeli reserve officer and lightly wounded three reserve non-commissioned officers and another NCO.
“ANOTHER BLATANT CEASEFIRE VIOLATION,” the IDF said in a post on X. “This incident follows numerous blatant ceasefire violations by Hezbollah. Just last night, 4 IDF soldiers fell in combat against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.”
‼️ ANOTHER BLATANT CEASEFIRE VIOLATION: As a result of an explosive drone impact in southern Lebanon, an IDF reserve officer was severely injured, and 3 reserve NCOs & an NCO were lightly injured.
This incident follows numerous blatant ceasefire violations by Hezbollah. Just… https://t.co/I0LgRUk8sH
— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) June 19, 2026
“Hezbollah has showed time and time again: it is not committed to the ceasefire, but to causing instability in the region,” the military added.
ALSO READ: US-Iran Talks Postponed? What We Know As Vance Delays Switzerland Trip
The developments come days after US and Iranian leaders signed a preliminary agreement aimed at ending the Iran conflict. Under the framework of the provisional deal, both sides and allied groups are expected to suspend military activities, including operations linked to Lebanon.
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