What work is keeping you busy?
I recently joined the professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal Taxand UK. I am actively embedding myself within their culture but particular hot topics are FATCA tax risk management and responses to the regulatory change agenda.
Name a highlight of your career
The obvious answer is the tax integration of Lehman’s Asian and European businesses into Nomura. That certainly ranks high because of the exhaustive change agenda it involved and the remarkable achievements and commitment of so many top quality people to achieve impossible targets. A close second would be the tax structuring around an Italian postal bond trade executed in the 1990s. It called for some real high-speed judgment and commercial calls the tax structuring was genuinely neat and worked perfectly but I remember it mainly because it was fun.
To what extent will the GAAR affect the financial...