Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Tax Event and Change in Tax Law

Tax Event

Basically the gist is this: if the rules change after the Trade Date such that you have to gross up an Indemnifiable Tax would weren’t expecting to when you priced the trade, you have a right to get out of the trade, rather than having to ship the gross up for the remainder of the Transaction.

That said, this paragraph is a bastard to understand. Have a gander at the JC’s nutshell version (premium only, sorry) and you’ll see it is not such a bastard after all, then.

In the context of cleared swaps, you typically add a third limb, which is along the lines of:

(3) required to make a deduction from a payment under an Associated LCH Transaction where no corresponding gross up amount is required under the corresponding Transaction Payment under this Agreement.

Change in Tax Law

So one mild observation here is that this definition of a “Change in Tax Law” does not specifically mention, you know, tax per se. Which at first glance is odd.

This transpires not to matter, though, seeing as Change in Tax Law appears only twice in the 2002 ISDA, and in each case the context in which it appears is very specific to tax. They are:

• Section 2(d)(4)(B) (which deals with exclusions to the general requirement to gross up for Indemnifiable Taxes; and
• Section 5(b)(iii) (Tax Events), defining things that count as Tax Events by making an Affected Party more likely to suffer an Indemnifiable Tax.

The provisions surrounding gross up and termination and Indemnifiable Taxes are some of the most (linguistically) complicated in the ISDA Master Agreement, by the way.