I'm not sure what you mean? At the point of acquisition if you are given shares worth say £10k, it's the same as being given £10k cash, or £10k gift of some sort - you pay income tax based on the value of what you were given. It's different if you were given options - then the difference between your purchase price and sale price is taxed as capital gains with separate rules.

And no, it's a British company .

Insane then, why did they not set up a proper scheme https://www.gov.uk/tax-employee-share-schemes.

Bit of a red flag that the company is so badly run.

Because while I work for a British company the shares are awarded by our French HQ, so unfortunately none of those share planes are available in this case. The company employs 50k+ people globally and only HQ awards shares.

Also I'm not sure how much tax this would actually save - you can only get £3600 worth of shares tax free per year on the employee incentive plan(which seems closest to what I'm getting, flat number of shares after 4 years). That's a very....low amount.