Wealth Protection

Once clients have built up a successful business, their focus will naturally progress from business development to wealth protection.

A common strategy to follow is to generate profits/income during your working life within a business, then to transfer this wealth into personal ownership in low maintenance investments with potential for growth in capital value.

We can assist in wealth protection by assessing risk and then advising on introducing appropriate mitigation:

Structure

• ‘Wrapping’ a limited liability company or limited liability partnership ‘shell’ around a high risk commercial trade,
• Transferring valuable assets (eg property, equity, cash, IP or tools of the trade) to:
  • Personal ownership,
  • Appropriate trusts (perhaps before full succession to the next generation, or to protect against possible future divorce),
  • A self administered pension scheme or a Self Invested Personal Pension,
  • Establishing a group structure, with separate trading subsidiary(ies), with valuable assets held within the parent company,
  • Your spouse,
  • Another form of or SPV,
• Structuring your affairs to minimise the wealth reduction that inheritance tax would cause upon your death,

Robust Financial Management

• Undertaking a voluntary or statutory audit as, both, a preventative and detective measure.
• Introducing appropriate financial controls, timely financial reporting procedures and other examples of best practice governance.
• Registering for the Companies House PROOF secure online submission system, to reduce the risk of being a victim of corporate identity fraud.
• Converting higher risk property and equity investments into lower risk asset types.
• Diversifying bank accounts between different banks, to spread your risk exposure and maximise the protection given by government backed investor protection schemes.
• Undertaking competent tax compliance, to make sure you self assess the correct (minimum) amount of tax, declared and paid correctly before the appropriate deadline. This will minimise the risk of any back-taxes being identified through a future HMRC tax enquiry, records check or control visit.

Insurance

• Taking comprehensive commercial and property insurance cover,
• Taking fee protection insurance, to protect against the professional fees that would become payable from defending a claim for back-taxes from HMRC, arising after a tax investigation.
• Advising on and offering appropriate stakeholder protection (life and health insurance) cover.
• Spreading cash deposits around different banks so as to maximise automatic Government protection (usually £85k per bank).

Legals/Contracts

• Amending the company’s Articles of Association to amend the default company law rules on pre-emption rights, share transfers, tag along and drag along provisions, etc.
• Advising in relation to creating appropriate shareholder/partnership agreements.
• Making sure the Wills of key individuals are consistent with such agreements.

Disclaimer - All information in this post was correct at time of writing.