Buying or Selling a Company

Through our specialist M&A tax experience across multiple sectors, we can help you identify key tax considerations and provide practical tax advice, in line with the commercial objectives of your transaction and future plans for you and your business. We can also assist with valuing your business for the purposes of the sale or acquisition process. We work alongside key stakeholders in your business and work in conjunction with lawyers and corporate finance advisers in order to negotiate and implement the most tax-efficient structure and maximise value for our clients. Typical points to consider include:

• Ensuring that relevant capital gains tax reliefs are taken advantage of when a business is sold.
• Many deals in the OMB sector include an earn-out or an element of deferred consideration. The tax rules here can be particularly complicated and if not correctly structured, unnecessary tax charges can arise in advance of the deferred consideration being received.
• Where the deferred consideration takes the form of a debt, other than a simple debt, owed by the company to the vendor and repayable at a later date, the tax position again can become complicated.
• Subject to meeting certain criteria, if you own a trading company, you can sell some or all of your shares to an employee ownership trust without incurring any capital gains tax liability in a way which also benefits your employees.

At ETC Tax we have a highly experienced team who form part of the overall ‘deal team’. We are happy to discuss with you your plans or aspirations and work with you to help you achieve your objectives.