PRACTICE AREAS
TAX
Enterprise Structuring
Cross-border Tax Planning
Corporate Reorganisations
In business, legal advice has tax consequences. Westaway Corporate Law has the formal training and long experience to include tax law among its corporate services for coherent and complete solutions.
​
Enterprise Structuring
Tax determines the underlying architecture of every enterprise structure. At its most basic, such tax considerations include the matching of revenues and expenses, flowing losses through to investors, minimising tax at the level of the business association, flowing cash on a non-taxable basis within a larger group and accessing special tax credits or rates upon an eventual sale or other exit. Such considerations must, however, be considered in conjunction with the many non-tax considerations, such as limitation of liability, participation and value allocation on a sale, dilution of both share and overall enterprise value, dilution of control and the setting of parameters upon management. Westaway Corporate Law is all but unique in covering both sides of the artificial, and largely unhelpful, legal and tax divide.
​
Cross-border Tax Planning
Business does not stop at the border. Westaway Corporate Law is unique in its emphasis upon cross-border enterprises, both inbound and outbound. Every country has particular rules addressing cross-border ownership, financial relationships and cash flows. These rules are then modified by a global network of bi-lateral tax treaties. Largely tax driven, these rules require the highly specialised knowledge and experience that Westaway Corporate Law offers.
​
Corporate Reorganisations
Enterprise structuring does not end upon the initial set up but may need to be revisited from time to time as ownership, finances and business opportunities evolve. Such reorganisations could be as simple as transferring capital assets to a corporation on a tax-deferred basis, introducing employee stock options, tailoring the share capital to accommodate new investors, implementing an “estate freeze” to transfer future growth to the next generation or complicated such as dividing corporate assets among shareholders on a tax-deferred basis pursuant to what is colloquially known as a “butterfly” or reorganising to avoid the application of U.S. CFC (controlled foreign corporate) rules, PFIC (passive foreign investment company) rules and similar tax regimes aimed at non-U.S. corporations. However complicated matters may be, Westaway Corporate Law prides itself on making the complex simple and simply understood.