Photo of Catherine Sear

Catherine Sear is a partner in the Tax Department and a member of the Private Funds Group. She specializes in the tax aspects of structuring and investing in private investment funds including private equity, venture capital, infrastructure, debt and real estate funds, funds of funds, secondary funds and other investment partnerships.

She advises sponsors and investors on a wide variety of UK and international tax issues related to private investment funds and their operations, including tax aspects of:

  • structuring and raising private investment funds
  • structuring carried interest and executive coinvestment arrangements
  • restructuring existing private investment funds
  • establishment and operation of fund management businesses
  • investments by institutional investors in private funds
  • separate accounts for institutional investors, acting for both fund managers and investors
  • secondary transactions, both buy-side and sell-side
  • coinvestment structures

Catherine advises on a broad range of UK tax issues including VAT, employment tax, capital gains tax in relation to partnerships, withholding taxes and tax rules relating to carried interest. She also has considerable knowledge of international tax issues arising for investment structures with a cross-border dimension and experience with multijurisdictional fund management teams.

Welcome to the September 2017 edition of the Proskauer UK Tax Round Up. Since our last edition, the Finance (No 2) Bill has been published and started its passage through the House of Commons, draft legislation for inclusion in next year’s Finance Bill has been published and the date for

The Upper Tribunal (Tax and Chancery Chamber), the UK’s second level tax appeal court, have just published their judgement in the McQuillan case, which considered whether shares with no right to dividends or any other profits are or are not “ordinary share capital” (OSC) for UK tax purposes. There are a number of UK tax rules that depend on how much OSC is held, and OSC is defined as all share capital except for any share capital that carry a right to a dividend at a fixed rate and no other right to share in the company’s profits. This decision concluded that such shares are OSC.

Background

As mentioned in our July 2017 edition of UK Tax Round Up, the UK has enacted a new corporate criminal offence of failing to prevent the facilitation of tax evasion. The law comes into effect on 30th September 2017, and businesses should ensure that they have considered its impact before then. A risk assessment could be required to be carried out before 30th September, and applicable policies and prevention measures may need to be considered.

After numerous UK tax changes affecting asset managers over the past few years – not least the wholesale re-vamping of the tax treatment of carried interest and other fund participations for investment fund managers – the UK government’s budget last week (8 March 2017) was a relatively uneventful affair for those in the investment management sphere.