High profile mortgage advice company, John Charcol, has been bought by Towergate Financial, the financial advice arm of the Towergate Partnership. The sale was announced yesterday, only a day after the struggling mortgage broker went into administration.

It has been reported that, under the terms of the deal, Charcol's 100 staff and directors will move to Towergate Financial and will be based, for the most part, in London.

Towergate was set up in 1997 by Peter Cullum, the group's executive chairman, and specialises in niche insurance business. Its headquarters are in Kent but its 4,500 employees are based in around 100 offices throughout the UK. The company has a turnover of £318m.

Towergate's acquisition ties in with its objective to establish a mortgage advice service for wealthy individuals as well as corporate clients. It has already purchased over 150 broking firms and underwriting agencies.

Mr Cullen said: "This is another great acquisition for Towergate which fits our strategy of brand leadership in our specialist fields."

There is a certain amount of controversy surrounding the sale as it involved a pre-pack process, which will mean that although more than 100 jobs will be saved, John Charcol's creditors will be out of pocket.

Information has not been released on how much Towergate paid for the company but it is believed to be a nominal sum.

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The Competition Commission has given provisional go-ahead to ITV for the sale of social networking site Friends Reunited to online genealogy company Brightsolid.

ITV bought Friends Reunited for £170m in December 2005 and announced its intention to sell the business last year after suffering heavy mid-year losses.

Brightsolid already owns genealogy sites FindMyPast.com and 1911Census.com. As Friends Reunited is the parent company of genealogy site, Genes Reunited, Brightsolid's proposed £25m acquisition of Friends Reunited was referred to the Competition Commission when the proposed sale was announced last summer.

The regulator's provisional findings are that this acquisition would not result in a reduction of competition for consumers.

ITV and Brightside have both welcomed the news and the National Archive has also announced its support for the deal.

It is expected that Brightside will merge its existing genealogy sites with Genes Reunited. However, even after this merger, the main player in the market, Ancestry.co.uk, will remain the largest in the market.

The area of genealogy research is growing rapidly, with estimates that approximately 2 million people access genealogy websites in the UK every month.

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So how did businesses take advantage of the 10% rate of capital gain tax payable on the selling of a business after the 5th April this year? Linda Bennett of LK Bennett shoes and the potato farmer behind Tyrells Crisps had a neat trick. They effectively “sold” their businesses to a trust otherwise known as warehousing. Capital gains tax rules judge the date of disposal as being when an unconditional contract is entered into, not when a deal is completed. The unconditional agreement was to sell the business to a trust contingent on finding a third party buyer. As such, this crystallised any gain so as to be liable for the 10% rate with a view to disposing of the business by the trust later in the year.

So what is the problem? The difficulty could come where the company that is warehoused is no longer able or willing to be sold. In this case the Inland Revenue may consider that you have sold a company to your trust and then effectively bought it back by tearing up the unconditional sale agreement. This would mean that you may face a large tax bill without the proceeds to pay it. Now that would be bad news.

The Inland revenue has always maintained that advance clearance or approval may be given to any sort of tax avoidance measure including company sales. As such it could be that if anyone had any doubts they should have consulted the revenue first. If the economy becomes more fragile and many potential sales fall through then entrepreneurs will also be out of pocket on stamp duty and legal fees.

However, it is unlikely that in practice the inland revenue would try and force this issue and demand payment of tax when no real benefit or proceeds have been realised. But the Inland revenue are not generally considered to be very generous so it is important to be vigilant.

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