>revenue must not have involvement with "connected parties."
>disclosed that two of my shareholders also worked at companies that were customers
...and surprise surprise the revenue gets disputed. Disclosing things doesn't invalidate pieces of the contract - if anything it strengthens it given solid evidence to the opposing party here.
That's it. End of story. And yes, good advice - lawyers may have saved this.
The rest reads like the result of a desperate laymans search for anything that might back an alternate interpretation....absolutely anything that might get these two obviously excluded revenue pieces back into scope. To call it a longshot would be generous:
>Had the "C" in "connected parties" been capitalized, it would have fallen under the HMRC Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act, which in the UK formally defines a Connected Party as a person who has control of a company, which was not the case with either of my shareholders.
Why would UK tax law definitions have any bearing on interpretation of what revenue is in scope for a valuation calculation?
But lets assume it somehow is via some unnamed mechanism. The act doesn't even mention "Connected Party" let alone define it. It does talk about connected persons but you'd need to squint pretty hard to turn party in persons via a capital C...and ignore the minor detail about it dealing with tax matters not M&A matters.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say there was no lawyer involved in the capital C part of the story at all.