Pound sign not encoding correctly...

Hi. I am busy writing some perl software that "receives" from a SOAP interface... in particular, I expect to receive strings that may include currency symbols such as £ or €

perl is pretty much 100% utf-8 and expects to receive a £ sign as hex(c2a3) - but I am receiving it as hex(a3)

I can confirm that I am sending, as far as SoapUI 5.2.0 is concerned, as UTF-8. So is it SoapUI getting the translation wrong somewhere along the line, or this a "feature" of SOAP (XML) or is there something inbetween that is re-translating and getting it wrong?

Any suggestions gratefully received - this is driving me nuts!

Bill