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Take advantage of our free expert resources, written by the experts at LCN Legal, based on their practical experience of working with multinational groups and their advisers across the globe. If you are interested in these areas, you may wish to bookmark this page to check back regularly for new information.

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How to give your intra-group distributors and service providers a coronavirus haircut

Paul Sutton

Last week the gods of Amazon smiled down on me and answered my prayer for new hair clippers. So on Friday I entrusted them to Xiaofang, and I think she did a pretty good job in the kitchen, as you can see from the picture above. In the transfer pricing world, many multinational enterprises are […]

Intercompany Agreements

COVID-19 and force majeure clauses in intercompany agreements

Paul Sutton

A short guide for transfer pricing and tax professionals on force majeure clauses in intercompany agreements and other key legal points to consider when revising transfer pricing policies in response to COVID-19 The OECD’s evaluation of the impact of COVID-19 containment measures on economic activity (as updated on 14 April 2020) suggests that “the initial […]

Intercompany Agreements

My grandfather and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Paul Sutton

I don’t usually share this kind of story, but it’s a special occasion today – it’s the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. My grandfather Edwin Oliver Sutton was born in Hankow, China (a district of Wuhan) in 1902. He was a Methodist minister and served as a chaplain in the British […]

LCN Updates

How to manage teams from home during Covid-19

Paul Sutton

Team meetings can be tough to get right. They can feel: Boring – if a small number of participants seem to be droning on about the amazing things they’ve been doing. Confusing – if there’s no clarity about the agenda or the concrete steps to be taken following the meeting. Frustrating – if the people […]

LCN Updates

Intercompany Agreements

Transfer Pricing in a Pandemic – Lessons from China

Paul Sutton

It has been very encouraging to receive the news from Xiaofang’s family and from our friends that life in China is starting to open up again. Her parents are now busy in her grandmother’s vegetable garden in the countryside near Xinzheng (having been allowed to leave the family home in the city), local schools in […]

Intercompany Agreements

Day-tight compartments

Paul Sutton

We’re not supposed to admit having read ‘How to Stop Worrying and Start Living’ by Dale Carnegie, but (apparently) it’s a very good book, and maybe it has special value right now. In it, the author makes an analogy between living day-by-day, and the construction of ships: vertical internal walls called bulkheads divide the ship […]

Intercompany Agreements

What we can learn from Roald Dahl about working from home

Paul Sutton

During my professional career so far, my working environment has ranged from three-trainees-in-a-room-without-windows, to partner-office-with-big-desk, to open plan (KPMG and Pinsent Masons), to working primarily from home (since 2013). For us at LCN Legal, what’s new about the current arrangements is not working from home, it’s having children in the home at the same time. […]

Intercompany Agreements

How to ‘survive’ coronavirus quarantine with children

Paul Sutton

There are probably very few areas of life where I’m ahead of you. One of them might be intercompany agreements for TP compliance. Another might be surviving* coronavirus quarantine – having spent around 5 weeks of ‘lock down’ in China, and then another two weeks of self-isolation in the UK. Since there seems a real […]

Intercompany Agreements

New: Free scoping tool for intercompany agreements, and how to survive coronavirus quarantine

Paul Sutton

I’m very pleased to report that we’ve survived the 14 day period of self-imposed quarantine in the UK, having flown back from China on 21st February. The only tense moments were wondering whether our children will pass the various airport temperature checks – they haven’t had any signs of fever, but they’re just naturally ‘hot’. […]

Intercompany Agreements

Do you actually know what you are doing?

Paul Sutton

As far as we can tell, containing the corona virus seems to depend more on washing hands, rather than wearing surgical masks the whole time. You might think that you know how to wash your hands effectively, but in reality you probably don’t. If you’re anything like me, you probably just act on auto-pilot, based […]

Intercompany Agreements

New OECD Transfer Pricing Guidance: 7 key takeaways for the legal documentation of financial transactions

Paul Sutton

On 11 February 2020 the OECD released its first guidance on the transfer pricing aspects of financial transactions, constituting an important supplement and update to its 2017 Transfer Pricing Guidelines. The guidance is divided into five main sections, namely: Interaction with the guidance provided in section D.1 of the 2017 guidelines (accurate delineation of the […]

Intercompany Agreements

Condor vs. human on a bicycle

Paul Sutton

I don’t know whether you’ve come across this Steve Jobs quote. I really like it: “I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the […]

Intercompany Agreements

HMRC's £5 billion transfer pricing 'naughty step'

Paul Sutton

Changing behaviours is a key part of getting the results that you want, if you feel that things are off track. In the Sutton household, we can’t claim that threatening the ‘naughty step’ has been massively effective in changing the behaviour of our three-year-old, but sometimes it works. HMRC seems to have had more success […]

Intercompany Agreements

Why you should review your inter-company agreements for post-BEPS compliance

Paul Sutton

This guest article was kindly contributed by Oliver Treidler and Tom-Eric Kunz, from TP&C GmbH, transfer pricing specialists based in Berlin, Germany. The OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project has created uncertainty about various transfer pricing issues and has made an already complex issue even more complex. Now that the dust has settled and […]

Intercompany Agreements

Not About the Year of the Rat

Paul Sutton

I had planned for this post to be about the Chinese Year of the Rat, and what it means if you were born in 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984 or 1996. But I’m writing this in China, having recently returned from a brief trip to the UK, and it doesn’t feel like the right time […]

Intercompany Agreements

5 common misconceptions about intercompany agreements

Paul Sutton

Leading transfer pricing professionals agree that appropriate related party agreements, often referred to as ‘intercompany agreements’ or ‘ICAs’, are an intrinsic part of transfer pricing compliance. Nevertheless, many practitioners and corporates suffer from misconceptions about ICAs and how they need to work. In some cases, these misconceptions lead to errors which can be fatal to […]

Intercompany Agreements

New for 2020: Document automation tool for creating Loan Note Instruments to document related party debt

Paul Sutton

A very Happy New Year to you! As part of the ongoing development of our ‘fast track’ service for intercompany agreements, we have released a new automation tool, which is to create a loan note instrument to document related party debt. This tool is suitable where the relevant debt is intended to be unsecured and […]

Intercompany Agreements

What has 2019 meant to us?

Paul Sutton

While we are excited about where our plans for 2020 will take us, our team has also reflected on what we have achieved in 2019, and what 2019 has meant to us. Learning You might think that with over 50 years’ combined experience of managing cross-border projects, we would know all there is to be […]

LCN Updates

Jersey / Guernsey / Isle of Man: no agreements, no substance

Paul Sutton

On 22 November 2019, guidance in relation to economic substance requirements was issued jointly by Guernsey, Isle of Man and Jersey. In general, the relevant ‘adequate substance’ requirements mean that (amongst other things) a company must conduct Core Income-Generating Activity (‘CIGA’) in the relevant island, and that activity must be actually directed and managed in […]

Intercompany Agreements

Substance over form in transfer pricing – a common misconception

Paul Sutton

It is often said that the OECD Transfer Pricing Guidelines emphasize substance over form, when it comes to delineating controlled transactions. This is true insofar as it goes, but it gives rise to a common misconception that functional analysis trumps legal agreements. It’s true that if an intercompany agreement (put in place in advance, or […]

Intercompany Agreements