International Tax Planning

Tax structuring is not an issue of increasing profits, but rather an issue of a business existence.

That sentence has been on this website since the company was founded, and it has become more accurate with time. A structure that cannot survive examination is not a saving. It is a deferred liability, and the deferral is usually shorter than people expect.

We develop taxation arrangements on an exclusively legal basis — on the regulations as they stand and on existing case law — and we document the commercial reasoning behind them at the time the decision is made, not afterwards.

What the work covers

Taxation advice on foreign economic activity

Where income arises, which state has the right to tax it, what withholding applies to dividends, interest and royalties, and how double tax treaties change the outcome. Advice may be given in connection with both local and foreign tax law — the latter through our partner in the relevant state, so that the position is confirmed by someone who practises there.

Tax planning and structuring

Design of the group structure: which entity holds what, how profits move between them, where the intellectual property sits, and how much substance each entity must maintain to be respected as a taxpayer in its own right.

This includes the parts clients rarely ask about but which decide the outcome under examination — permanent establishment risk, controlled foreign company rules, transfer pricing on intra-group transactions, and the general anti-avoidance provisions that now exist in most jurisdictions.

Integrated legal analysis

Tax advice is given as part of a complete legal picture rather than in isolation. Corporate law, contract law, currency control and reporting obligations all constrain what is achievable, and a tax-efficient answer that breaches one of them is not an answer.

Foreign economic contracts

The contract is where a tax position either holds or falls apart. We draft foreign economic contracts and carry out legal analysis of agreements already concluded, with attention to:

• whether the commercial terms actually match how the parties behave
• pricing between related parties, and whether it can be defended
• which jurisdiction’s law governs, and where disputes are resolved
• payment and currency provisions, and whether the banks in the chain will process them without repeated queries

Where an agreement has already been signed, we will say plainly if it does not support the structure built on top of it, and what can still be corrected.

How we work

We start from the commercial facts, not from a preferred jurisdiction. If the efficient answer requires substance the business is not willing to maintain, we say so — and we would rather lose the engagement than build something that fails in three years.

Every recommendation states what it depends on: which rules, which treaty, which facts must remain true. When circumstances change, you then know exactly what needs revisiting rather than discovering it during an audit.

A note on aggressive arrangements

International tax rules have changed substantially in the last decade — automatic exchange of information, beneficial ownership registers, economic substance requirements and minimum taxation rules. Arrangements that were once routine no longer work, and some now create more exposure than the tax they were designed to save.

We do not implement structures we would not be prepared to explain to a tax authority.