Afridi & Angell’s James Bowden highlights four of the latest legal updates.
In the past year the UAE saw an unusual number of important legislative developments. For this feature, we have picked a few of the key developments to summarise briefly. This is by no means exhaustive.
Barclays, Volkswagen and Tesco are three massive businesses in three significant, sophisticated and important business sectors. Each one of these successful and long-lived businesses has access to significant in-house legal expertise, each is capable of paying for the best legal advice money can buy, each has invested heavily in risk management. And all of them are now paying the price for poor decisions made by some senior people behaving badly, very badly.
Writing properly florid legal text takes years of practice. No-one enjoys reading it: not even the curmudgeon who has taken the trouble to write it. Construing a contract should not be a bodily pleasure but an act of ascetic sufferance, the reward for which comes in the hereafter*. Lawyers do this so you don’t have to.
Overnight the Public Accounts Committee published a timely report on ‘Tackling Tax Fraud’. It’s fairly short and you can read it here.
Prospectively the greatest point of interest in the report is when it addresses the ‘perception that HMRC does not tackle tax fraud by the wealthy.’
Continue reading “Guest post: A new report into HMRC’s investigation of tax fraud by the wealthy”
To avoid tax you have to do a thing which cuts your tax bill. Fail to do that thing and your tax bill is higher. But do it and you’ve avoided tax compared with an alternative world – economists call it a counterfactual but you and I would call it an overdraft – in which your tax bill is higher.
Continue reading “Guest post: On David Cameron and inheritance tax”
Kobre & Kim’s Robert Henoch and Michael Ng discuss third-party financing.
Outward-facing Israeli companies often find themselves facing off against larger, deep-pocketed adversaries, such as joint venture partners, investors, distributors, customers, licensees, or those who have infringed on their intellectual property (IP) rights. When this happens, well-financed opponents can leverage the threatened expenses of the legal process in their home countries to destroy the rights of smaller Israeli companies. Third-party litigation funding offers a potential solution for Israeli companies to vindicate their legal rights under such circumstances.
Continue reading “Litigation funding: Levelling the playing field”
Yigal Arnon’s Barry Levenfeld discusses tech sector exits.
Do Israeli companies exit too early? Some, primarily government officials, but also esteemed academics, think so. Israeli technology companies should resist being sold, they say. Instead, the companies should develop into global giants, employ thousands of Israelis – including those without advanced computer science degrees – and thereby enhance their contribution to the Israeli economy. The most recent salvo came from Manuel Trajtenberg, a Knesset member and respected economist, who warned at a conference: ‘The exits we applaud today are a disaster for the state of Israel.’ And then, twisting the knife further, he added: ‘A handful of people grow rich by selling the future of the nation.’
Two days in. Lots of column inches. But what will it all mean for the future? Some embarrassment, a scalp or two, then business as usual? Or meaningful change?
Deloitte’s 2016 report [Developing legal talent: Stepping into the future law firm] has garnered some attention for suggesting a ‘tipping point’ is coming to the legal profession as early as 2020. In truth, as interesting as the report is, it has not really produced new evidence to support the claim that, ‘[Legal services businesses] will need access to lawyers who have a broader skill set and are not just technically competent lawyers.’ This seems to be the guts of their case:
Continue reading “Guest post: Automation – the end of low-qualified lawyers?”
In the coming days you will hear a lot about the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion.
Continue reading “Guest post: The Panama Papers – why it’s very possible the behaviour is criminal”
