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Service. Those situations involved the amortization of the
premium value of an acquired lease on facts similar to the
example in the legislative history, supra. We agree with
petitioner that one of the motivating factors for enacting
section 167(c)(2) was to deal with that problem. The statutory
language, however, would ostensibly apply to anyone acquiring
property and is not in any manner limited to acquisitions for a
premium and/or by a purchaser of an asset subject to a lease that
is to continue into the future.
The parties have gone to great lengths to reword and/or
hypothesize the meaning of statutory phrase in controversy. The
phrase we consider, however, is quite succinct--“If any property
is acquired subject to a lease”. The threshold for application
of section 167(c)(2) applies to “any property” that “is acquired”
when it is “subject to a lease”. If property was not subject to
a lease when it was acquired, section 167(c)(2) would not apply.
So we must decide whether the property here was subject to a
lease when it was acquired. The plain language of the statute is
not limited in its application to acquisitions by lessors. Nor
does it delineate a requirement that the lease must continue
after the acquisition, only that the property be acquired subject
to a lease.
In order to interpret the phrase “subject to a lease” solely
as a continuing requirement as suggested by petitioner, we would
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