A young Toronto physician is the beneficiary of a trust set-up by a wealthy non-resident uncle. Her father had found us via a Google search. That trust owns shares of a UK based company in the retirement home business. The company will be starting to pay substantial amounts of dividends each year, and she naturally preferred to avoid Canadian taxes (at 46.4%). Traditional ways of structuring such "rich uncle trusts" were met with resistance from her uncle's UK-based tax advisors. They said that the approach used to avoid Canadian taxes would result in a substantial liability for UK taxes. I finalized a non-traditional approach that will permanently avoid taxes on that income in both Canada and the UK.

A Concord CA firm approached me regarding one of their clients involved in the investment advisory business. A major financial institution was offering to buy the shares of the company for about $10 million. However, there were assets in the company that were not to be included. How could these assets be removed and the deal be structured in the most efficient manner? I explained various options and tax issues involved in "spinning off" the "excluded assets". I determined that the best approach would be an asset sale of the business, as opposed to a share sale, thereby greatly simplifying the process and deferring over $1 million in taxes. After reviewing our comments and recommendations, they agreed to proceed in that manner.

An Ottawa-based gentleman contacted me via a Google search. He had lived in Germany for quite a few years, but had been treated by the CRA as a continuing Canadian resident for tax purposes. This resulted in payments of substantial amounts of Canadian taxes, even after credit was claimed for German taxes. Finally, the CRA had reversed itself and reclassified him as a non-resident for all of those years. He did not know how to get the wrongly assessed taxes back from the CRA for all of those old years. I clearly explained to him what he has to do, and he should get over $100K in taxes refunded. (BTW, I also told him that had I been advising him from day one, we would have told him not to have applied for a determination of residency status from the CRA in the first place, and appealed any attempt to assess him as a Canadian resident).

A Peterborough based equipment manufacturer was making a ton of money, and anticipated selling the business within the next couple of years.

Their local CA had contacted me months ago to devise a plan to:

• Allow excess cash to be removed from the business tax free, and
• Introduce a trust for family members of the two current shareholders as a shareholder in order to achieve estate planning objectives and multiply the "capital gains exemption" availability.

I refined a plan we had devised earlier to achieve these objectives, and assisted them in retaining and liaising with a lawyer to implement the plan over the next few weeks.

I was contacted by the general partner of a group that had funded a start-up situation in the bio-technology field. They had effectively foreclosed on the IP that was developed, and were considering a plan to donate that IP to a medical foundation and claim millions in charitable donations. The author of this plan was under the misconception that if they retained any interest in the donated property, the charitable donation would be denied for tax purposes. I advised that he misunderstood the rules, and explained certain other hurdles that would have to be overcome. He seemed happy with the increased flexibility that my advice had given him.

An estate held all the shares of an investment company worth many millions of $$$. Advisors had told them that their alternatives consisted of either liquidating that corporation, and incurring hundreds of thousands of $$$ in corporate and trust-level taxes, or selling to an arm's length buyer who would discount the price paid for the shares for such taxes. I was retained by the executor and had devised a plan under which an arm's length buyer could avoid any such taxes, and, hence, could buy the shares without any such discount, thereby saving the estate a bundle!. Certain aspects of the plan were finalized in this period.

An Israeli company is the major shareholder of a Canadian real estate development company. It devised a plan to transfer the shares to a company in the Channel Isles (Jersey to be exact). It thought that Canadian tax would not be an issue. However, I advised that their plan, as drafted, would trigger a liability for millions in Canadian taxes. I devised a way for them to achieve their commercial objectives without triggering any Canadian tax liability.