Contacts
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Derek S. Green
Partner
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Stephen D. Marcus
Partner
The firm's international tax lawyers provide tax advice to clients engaged in cross-border operations and activities. Common transactions include project investments, joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, restructurings and financings, including asset leasing. Our lawyers advise U.S. and foreign investors in their investments in foreign companies’ ventures and projects, as well as foreign investors in their investments in U.S. companies, ventures and projects.
Our international tax lawyers seek to minimize the worldwide taxation of a client's earnings from an investment, restructuring of the investment and eventual disposition of the investment. This often requires familiarity with the tax laws of foreign countries and bilateral and multilateral tax treaties, as well as the U.S. tax laws. Our tax lawyers also are experienced in drafting and negotiating tax-related provisions in acquisition, joint venture, financing and project agreement, which at times may involve the drafting of treaties, laws, rulings and other documents or agreements having similar effect in foreign countries.
Our international tax lawyers have detailed knowledge of the U.S. federal income tax laws applicable to both outbound investments and activities of U.S. taxpayers and inbound investments and activities of foreign taxpayers. For outbound investments and activities of U.S. taxpayers, the applicable U.S. federal income tax laws include the foreign tax credit, anti-deferral, outbound transfer and dual consolidated loss rules. For inbound investments and activities of foreign taxpayers, the applicable U.S. federal income tax laws include rules regarding taxation of effectively connected income as well as FIRPTA, withholding tax, FATCA compliance and earnings stripping limitations.
We have experience in advising clients in many industries, including:
- Global Energy
- Upstream Oil and Gas
- Liquefied Natural Gas
- Pipelines
- Technology
- Electric Power
- Petrochemical Projects
- Real Estate
- Mining
- Manufacturing
- Marketing
- Telecommunications
- Consulting
The principal role of our international tax lawyers is to design legal structures for our clients’ cross-border transactions and investments. We help structure legal entities and contractual arrangements to minimize host-country and home-country taxation. This often involves the use of intermediate holding companies and finance companies to reduce host-country taxation or to defer home-country taxation.
Our international tax lawyers often represent project consortia and other joint ventures among investors from multiple countries. These investments typically present challenging structuring issues due to the effects of differing tax rules in the venturers’ home countries.
We have handled a number of cross-border acquisitions involving publicly traded companies. These have included both taxable and tax-free transactions and U.S.-to-foreign, foreign-to-U.S. and foreign-to-foreign transactions. In one of these transactions, we obtained one of the few private letter rulings which the Internal Revenue Service has issued to date on the acquisition of a U.S. corporation by a foreign corporation.
Our international tax lawyers have a great deal of experience in structuring investments through tax-haven jurisdictions, including both countries with zero-tax regimes and countries with low-tax regimes that have extensive tax treaty networks. In this regard, we have advised clients on the numerous tax issues raised by corporate migration transactions in which a U.S. parent company reorganizes itself as an offshore company.