(International Tax Review Week, Feb. 9, 2003)
US law firm Dorsey & Whitney has launched a tax litigation group in London after acquiring the majority of Landwell’s UK tax litigation group. Landwell is the associated law firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The six-lawyer team, led by partner Simon Whitehead, started on February 3, 2003 and brought its support staff and client base with it. The move was made primarily in response to concerns that it would conflict with the Sarbanes-Oxley restrictions on services provided by audit firms to audit clients. Tax litigation was specified as a service that could not be provided to audit clients and the former Landwell group acts on behalf of many SEC-registered audit clients.
PricewaterhouseCoopers decided the group should transfer, as it would not be in its SEC-registered clients best interests to stay with Landwell. Leon Flavell, the senior partner of Landwell UK said: “I am pleased we have been able to meet the future needs of the clients and staff of the firm’s group tax litigation team.”
According to Whitehead, the group did consider other firms but had worked with Dorsey & Whitney before, and liked the people. “Dorsey has a deep global platform with a very strong international arbitration and litigation capability so it was natural for us to look here when we felt the need to move our team,” he said.
Whitehead claims that the team has no need for a big general tax group in the UK so the absence of an established tax practice in Dorsey’s 40-lawyer London office was not a problem. He is confident that the litigation tax group will be expanding and the firm may also expand its general tax practice. Whitehead’s group is running a number of big group actions including an ACT (advance corporate tax) group litigation and is due to start two more group claims including one based on EU cross-border losses.
Since 2001 there have been a number of important ECJ cases dealing with unfair national tax regimes including the Hoechst and Metallgesellschaft case dealing with group-income-election rules in particular relating to ACT. Pirelli’s January victory in the UK high court was based on these cases. Marks & Spencer meanwhile lost its tax appeal for group relief on cross-border losses against the UK revenue in December last year.
Landwell in the UK still has a small tax litigation group led by Ian Carson and the firm claims it intends to develop this group further.
- By Georgia Stanley