Leveraged Leasing: An Example of the use of Investment Appraisal Techniques.

The origins of leveraged leasing are the trust arrangements used in the 1870's in the United States of America by railroad companies to finance the acquisition of rolling stock (Fritch, 1977, p. 98). A trust was established to purchase the equipment. The trustee issued trust certificates to investors who provided the funds for the equipment acquisition. The trust certificates provided for the repayment of principal and interest at specified dates. The trust then leased the equipment to the railroad company and the rental paid by the railroad company was used to repay the trust certificates as they fell due. These arrangements were in reality conditional sale agreements and not leveraged leases. Leveraged leasing as we know it today was introduced in the U.S.A in 1963 after the Comptroller of the Currency permitted national and state chartered banks to own and lease personal property (Weston, 1983, p. 271). The arrangement was used initially by railroad and airline companies to finance the acquisition of large items of capital equipment. Companies within capital intensive industries could not absorb the tax benefits of ownership whereas the banks could. Leveraged leasing meant that the banks owned the equipment and claimed depreciation and other tax deductions associated with ownership. These benefits were passed onto the railroad companies through lower rentals which reflected the value of these taxation benefits.