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Catherine Sear

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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.

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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.

Many people will be familiar with the information gathering and reporting requirements the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard (“CRS”) places on financial institutions. The first exchanges of information between tax authorities will take place next year, with all CRS jurisdictions exchanging information by 2018. And we are now starting to see how tax authorities expect this information to change the taxpayer/tax authority dynamic.