But alongside the negative purpose, there is also the positive purpose. This purpose was sometimes understood as intended to make things easier with the family unit. However, as the courts have pointed out, the presumption of the family unit creates a kind of "marriage fine" and therefore it is difficult to explain things in this way.
The meaning of the positive purpose is to focus the tax benefit on the entity to which the legislature designated the tax benefits given to the purchaser of a single apartment.
As we have seen, the tax relief in such a purchase (as well as in the sale of a single qualifying apartment) is intended for a social purpose - to facilitate the purchase of a roof over one's head for the use of a person and his family.
This purpose is not fulfilled when it comes to a minor who naturally lives with his parents. Purchasing an apartment for such a minor is first and foremost for investment purposes. There is no justification for granting tax relief when purchasing and selling an investment apartment. In contrast to a situation in which an adult purchases a single apartment and does not live in it, but rather rents it out and uses the rent to rent an apartment, when a minor is part of a family unit in which there is already a residential apartment - the purchase of the apartment for the minor is an investment step, which is in no way related to the nature of the property to which the legislature directed when granting the benefits for a single apartment.
- The appellants claim that accepting the respondent's position will lead to the denial of a right reserved to them. I don't see things that way. The property to which the legislature chose to grant the tax benefits is not the type of investment asset purchased by the appellants. In light of this, there is nothing wrong with not receiving tax benefits, which were not intended for such cases at all.
The fact that it is certainly possible that even in the future, if they do not sell their current apartment, they will not receive the tax benefits - since they own a number of residential apartments - I do not see any reason for the defect in it either. There is no right, substantive and principled, that requires the provision of a benefit once in a lifetime - to one who is happily not within the framework for which this benefit is intended.
- The view that the presumption of the family unit is not intended solely for the negation of tax planning found expression in the words of the Honorable Justice Y. Danziger, at paragraph 48 in the Shlomi case, while he chose to illustrate the matter in a case similar to our case here:
The legal "fiction" set forth in these two sections also ignores details relating to the potential intention of the members of the family unit in a separate registration of ownership of a number of apartments. The assumption is that behind such a registration will usually be an improper motive to trick the tax authorities and obtain an exemption or relief in an illegitimate manner, but it is certainly possible that there is a legitimate motive behind such registration. For example, parents who purchase an apartment and wish to register it in the name of their minor children in order to ensure their future at this stage, or the parents' desire to give a gift to one of the children and not to the other. The legal "fiction" set forth in these two sections examines all these cases in the same way and assigns them to one identical category, thus instructing us that these data are not relevant for the purpose of the discussion at the tax level, and therefore we must ignore them.
- Indeed - and so the appellants argue, in this case the funding was made by the grandfather and not by the parents. This is indeed a difference, but I believe that it is not enough. Given that there is no suspicion of tax planning, the source of funding is not the significant point of gravity.
The point of gravity lies in the fact that the purchase of apartments by minors is not the type of purchase that the legislature has directed the tax breaks given to individual apartments. There is no justification for granting benefits to such assets, whether the source of funding comes from the parents or from the grandparents' section.