Covid-19 and the consequent lockdowns have had a significant impact on many of our clients. As a finance tax specialist, I’ve been advising on the launch of a specialist real estate focused debt fund (helping to plug the funding gap left by other lenders retrenching from the market), and the restructuring of a range of corporate groups and their finance arrangements. I’ve also been advising on a host of Bank of England backed funding options, as well as advising private capital investors on various structured finance mandates.
What advice would you give to someone at the start of their tax career?
If there is an area of tax in which you wish to specialise, then invest in it holistically and early on. Read around the subject; make the effort to learn from colleagues, clients and peers at other firms; and build relationships with all of these people. Taking this approach early on helps with understanding the business fundamentals and commercial rationale for why tax input is necessary, and it also helps to demystify things, including the jargon! It should help reveal the bigger picture and enable a more practical application of tax knowledge.
If you could make one change in tax, what would it be?
Like most tax advisers, I enjoy the challenge of getting to grips with how changes in tax law affect my clients. But what isn’t fun is picking up my statute book and finding that the tax legislation is more difficult to understand than it needs be. Let’s make things easier to decode and more targeted. We could start with redrafting the UK hybrid rules or the corporate interest restriction rules.
Has a recent case has caught your eye?
Fowler v HMRC [2020] UKSC 22 is a reminder that the interpretation of double tax treaties has a range of considerations and can be complex. This case is particularly relevant to me in the context of debt funds that have lending vehicles seeking to access double tax treaty relief across various jurisdictions. Reviewing double tax treaties with the applicable MLI overlay often raises interesting questions. Since the adoption of the relevant MLI provisions (e.g. the principal purpose test), we are less able to fall back on established positions and guidance to achieve certainty. We need to see whether HMRC will update its guidance on certain key double tax treaty concepts and its supporting treaty relief documents (including the relevant certified double tax treaty relief forms, DTTP scheme forms and DTTP scheme terms and conditions) with regard to the MLI overlay. Further, we are seeing jurisdictions interpret these provisions differently, making the structuring of such funds more challenging. Of note is the HMRC LBS DT Treaty Team’s help and pragmatism during the pandemic in accepting scanned DTTP forms for the purposes of issuing tax directions and renewing DTTP passports for treaty entitled lenders.
What should we look out for in 2021?
After a challenging year, I’ve been speaking with many clients to understand their 2021 business plans, strategies and modelling. I suspect there will be a further uptick in financial and group restructurings as businesses come to re-evaluate their third party funding and any short-term Bank of England backed funding options taken up during the pandemic. Private capital investors are likely to be interested in the distressed debt market and seek to launch or invest in debt funds in this space. Tax will be a critical component to all of this. It will be interesting to see what the chancellor can do in the Budget to help the economy and businesses emerge from this pandemic in as fit a state as possible.
You might not know this about me but...
I absolutely love cars – sourcing them, driving them, racing them and restoring them (not necessarily in that order). I am currently helping to restore four cars with an aggregate age of over 180 years – and I am hoping that the pet tortoise my wife and I bought during lockdown will hit that age too!
Covid-19 and the consequent lockdowns have had a significant impact on many of our clients. As a finance tax specialist, I’ve been advising on the launch of a specialist real estate focused debt fund (helping to plug the funding gap left by other lenders retrenching from the market), and the restructuring of a range of corporate groups and their finance arrangements. I’ve also been advising on a host of Bank of England backed funding options, as well as advising private capital investors on various structured finance mandates.
What advice would you give to someone at the start of their tax career?
If there is an area of tax in which you wish to specialise, then invest in it holistically and early on. Read around the subject; make the effort to learn from colleagues, clients and peers at other firms; and build relationships with all of these people. Taking this approach early on helps with understanding the business fundamentals and commercial rationale for why tax input is necessary, and it also helps to demystify things, including the jargon! It should help reveal the bigger picture and enable a more practical application of tax knowledge.
If you could make one change in tax, what would it be?
Like most tax advisers, I enjoy the challenge of getting to grips with how changes in tax law affect my clients. But what isn’t fun is picking up my statute book and finding that the tax legislation is more difficult to understand than it needs be. Let’s make things easier to decode and more targeted. We could start with redrafting the UK hybrid rules or the corporate interest restriction rules.
Has a recent case has caught your eye?
Fowler v HMRC [2020] UKSC 22 is a reminder that the interpretation of double tax treaties has a range of considerations and can be complex. This case is particularly relevant to me in the context of debt funds that have lending vehicles seeking to access double tax treaty relief across various jurisdictions. Reviewing double tax treaties with the applicable MLI overlay often raises interesting questions. Since the adoption of the relevant MLI provisions (e.g. the principal purpose test), we are less able to fall back on established positions and guidance to achieve certainty. We need to see whether HMRC will update its guidance on certain key double tax treaty concepts and its supporting treaty relief documents (including the relevant certified double tax treaty relief forms, DTTP scheme forms and DTTP scheme terms and conditions) with regard to the MLI overlay. Further, we are seeing jurisdictions interpret these provisions differently, making the structuring of such funds more challenging. Of note is the HMRC LBS DT Treaty Team’s help and pragmatism during the pandemic in accepting scanned DTTP forms for the purposes of issuing tax directions and renewing DTTP passports for treaty entitled lenders.
What should we look out for in 2021?
After a challenging year, I’ve been speaking with many clients to understand their 2021 business plans, strategies and modelling. I suspect there will be a further uptick in financial and group restructurings as businesses come to re-evaluate their third party funding and any short-term Bank of England backed funding options taken up during the pandemic. Private capital investors are likely to be interested in the distressed debt market and seek to launch or invest in debt funds in this space. Tax will be a critical component to all of this. It will be interesting to see what the chancellor can do in the Budget to help the economy and businesses emerge from this pandemic in as fit a state as possible.
You might not know this about me but...
I absolutely love cars – sourcing them, driving them, racing them and restoring them (not necessarily in that order). I am currently helping to restore four cars with an aggregate age of over 180 years – and I am hoping that the pet tortoise my wife and I bought during lockdown will hit that age too!
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