In his bestelling book, ‘Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, Giles Milton tells the story of the destruction of Peugeot’s factory in Occupied France. The facility had been commandeered for German military production. One night, Bomber Command ordered the dropping of a massive amount of ordnance on the plant, only to discover the following day that they had missed their target completely and, instead, razed a number of French villages with several hundred innocent civilians providing a tragic statistic of ‘collateral damage’. The next attempt, which was as successful as the bombing raid had been a disaster, involved a handful of saboteurs placing plastic explosive at key points in the building.

Israel’s trust tax provisions, that largely took effect in 2006, could have been orchestrated by Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris himself. They are so far from perfect that they look like   the Knesset Finance Committee opened its bomb hatches and peppered them over the taxpaying public. It is well known that the authorities were so concerned about the capacity to use trusts to evade taxes, that they legislated to nab the heinous few, while causing collateral damage across the local and international economy.

Sifting through the debris, an example of legislation that appears to have been totally lacking in precision is the instruction that ‘the provisions of the third chapter of Section III’ will not apply to trusts. References like that are what Churchill might have called, ‘ A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’ – obscure enough to be missed by anyone but the most obsessive tax wallah. Well, lo and behold, the chapter’s sections deal with the very human provisions of deductions and credits, such as those applying to pensions and the personal status of the individual – the stuff that amorphous trusts should be rightly excluded from. Indeed, the tax authority’s explanatory circular gives such items as the examples.

However, somebody at the drafting stage obviously became bored, and didn’t notice the tax credit for charitable donations tucked away in the chapter. An individual is entitled to a 35% tax credit for donations to Israeli recognized institutions up to the lower of 30% of taxable income and around 9.2 million shekels. That is quite an incentive to donate. The trouble is that, according to the law, a trust (technically, the trustee) – that pays tax in Israel like an individual – cannot avail itself of that credit.

There is collateral damage, and there is collateral damage. Trusts , by character if not by definition, make charitable donations. In countries where tax efficient, those donations might be by way of making the charitable body a beneficiary. But, in Israel there is generally no tax on distributions anyway – the tax is on the annually earned income. So, by denying benefits at the trust’s taxable income level, they are being denied absolutely.

The bottom line is that it is not tax efficient for trusts to make charitable donations. That smacks less of collateral damage, and more of insane carpet bombing. It is almost as crazy as the Germans deciding to make their vehicles in France, and putting a man by the name of Porsche in charge of  the Peugeot factory.

As WWII proved, it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.