Expertise
James’s core skill is working out what the tax consequences are for clients when they enter into transactions which involve the movement, alteration, creation or the provision of assets, liabilities or services. His clients mainly comprise larger corporates whether or not UK resident, but he also regularly advises high net worth individuals, partnerships and families.
His practice mainly involves providing tax structuring advice in the following core areas:
- the sale and/ or acquisition of companies or businesses;
- corporate group reorganisations;
- large-scale real estate investment and development (both commercial and residential property); and
- employment related securities/share options and share incentive schemes.
James has been a tax lawyer since 1997 and a corporate tax partner since 2006. During that time he was also been the consulting editor for LexisNexis Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents for VAT on Property, Stamp Duty Land Tax, Stamp Duty Reserve Tax and Stamp Duty. In 2004 he wrote the SDLT commentary for the Encyclopaedia. He is a member of the Property Taxes Committee of the Chartered Institute of Taxation.
He recently edited the chapters “Selling a Company” and “Buying a Company” in Tolley’s Tax Planning. He is the author of the VAT chapter in the Law of Yachts and Yachting (which deals with, primarily, the UK, French and Italian VAT treatment of the sale, charter, export, import and provisioning of superyachts) and has recently edited “Receivers and VAT” for LexisNexis PSL.
How do you help clients?
I help my clients understand the short and long term tax consequences of their transactions and I seek to find the most tax efficient way of effecting those transactions.
Some examples that typify the sort of transactions in which I am involved are as follows:
- helping an entrepreneur understand the CGT, IHT and income tax problems he and his family would be facing if nothing were done to the holding of share capital in his company and providing a tax efficient succession plan to family members;
- advising a group of shareholders on the taxation of the consideration for the target company which comprised a mixture of cash, loan notes, earn-out and equity/ US LLC common stock;
- providing a second opinion to an investment bank on the tax consequences for a corporate borrower on the intra-group reorganisation of its real estate and intellectual property assets on which the group’s borrowing was secured
- advising lenders and borrowers on the tax treatment of the variation, assignment/novation and release of existing debt;
- advising on the most tax efficient way of separating a company’s non-trading investments/activities and its failing trading business from its profitable trading activities in anticipation of a future sale;
- advising a private equity house on the acquisition structure of company to minimise employment taxes, maximise interest deductions and minimise withholding tax on debt repayment;
- providing the tax structuring report to a non-UK resident family who were selling a multinational foodstuffs group company to a Spanish buyer;
- advising a group of neighbouring landowners on the most tax efficient way of selling 30 acres of land to a national housebuilder for the purposes of residential development;
- advising a group of national housebuilders on how to structure the acquisition and build out of a 200 acre site from multiple landowners with phased development planned over a 30-year period;
- advising a US commercial property investor on the SDLT, VAT, CT and CIS treatment of the acquisition and development of a UK site to be used as a data centre;
- advising a UK company on the non-availability of the various statutory tax favoured share schemes and designing a Growth Share Plan targeted at two senior executives and drafting the Plan’s documentation.
