“Advising on tax and succession planning is what I do for a living, but experience has taught me that the answer to a business owner’s tax-planning question is not always the best solution for their succession-planning ambitions.
I have vivid experience of an entrepreneur who profoundly wishes he had never embraced a succession plan. For commercial and political reasons, the patriarch had to divest himself of legal control of his burgeoning business empire. He was advised to transfer the shares in his enterprises into trust, with competent, respectable trustees who would be given a clear mandate as to how to manage it.
The patriarch was not adopting a particularly unusual arrangement. The trust as a concept has been used for centuries in the UK to transfer the legal ownership, and thus benefit, of assets without transferring total control to intended beneficiaries. The economic enjoyment of the assets is separated from their legal control.
Following this well-trodden path, the patriarch transferred the shares in his enterprises to trustees carefully chosen by him…..”
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