Roy Saunders

Founder and Chairman, IBSA

Since qualifying as a Chartered Accountant in 1967, Roy Saunders has accumulated a wealth of commercial experience working independently in commercial property, international tax, advertising and other industries. He is the Chairman of IFS, a boutique international tax practice based in central London. Academically, he is known throughout the world for his many books and publications, the foremost being his red book, International Tax Systems & Planning Techniques published by Sweet & Maxwell. Roy has also taught an MA Course on International Taxation at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London.

Roy is very proud of the fascinating client base of entrepreneurial individuals that he has built up at IFS. He feels strongly about the role that ethical tax structuring plays in the growth of an economy, and that this needs to be better understood by the public at large. Roy founded the IBSA to enable business professionals around the world to discover new business relationships and promote best practice by creating sustainable business structures compliant with international transparency, corporate governance and social responsibility.

Jose Aguilar Shea

Partner, Squire Patton Boggs

Jose Aguilar Shea is a partner of the Tax Strategy & Benefits department in our Madrid office. He has broad experience as a tax lawyer with particular expertise in the international tax practice including investment planning, reorganizations and joint ventures and commercial transactions.

Through secondments in Lisbon and Sao Paulo, Jose has been able to acquire an in-depth knowledge of the Brazilian tax and legal system.

Jose lectures in the international tax master’s program of Centro de Estudios Financieros in Madrid and is a regular speaker at various international legal forums and conferences.

Matteo Rapinesi

Senior Partner, LAWP

Matteo Rapinesi is a Partner at LAWP.  His practice mainly focuses on international tax law. He has extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions, joint-ventures, corporate finance transaction as well as in estate and succession planning. He is also involved in real estate transactions.

Author of publications on commercial and tax law, Matteo is the co-author of the Italian chapter of the volume International Tax Systems and Planning Techniques published by Sweet & Maxwell.

Lecturer at the postgraduate Master courses in Taxation and Business Law organized by Il Sole 24 Ore Business School.

Matteo is also a member to the scientific committee for the Scuola di Alta Formazione delle Tre Venezie.

Alex Watt

Partner, Howard Kennedy

Alex Watt is an experienced intellectual property lawyer who specialises in commercial transactions that have intellectual property, often brands and their growth, at their heart.  Alex is a Partner whose practice tends to involve commercial legal work in IP-centric businesses, such as licensing, gaming, egaming, franchising and publishing. He is also known for his work within the art world, within which he advises galleries, auction houses and the artists themselves.

He has a deep knowledge of advertising and marketing and he leads the firm's advertising & marketing practice, providing advice to both agencies and brands directly.  Recently such work has included increasing amounts of affiliate marketing and work a lot of work with influencers, and influencer agencies – as well as promotional advice, drafting ISBA compliant agency agreements, production agreements, sponsorship agreements, and advice more generally on ASA complaints and compliance.

Mark Stephens CBE

Partner, Howard Kennedy

Specialising in international, appellate and complex litigation,  Mark Stephens has undertaken some of the highest profile cases in the country and abroad.

Mark is a solicitor with an expertise in constitutional, human rights, IP, media and regulatory work, defamation, privacy, media, art and cultural property, data protection and freedom of information, trusts litigation, intellectual property and international arbitration disputes.  He has created a niche in international comparative media law and regulation. He acts in judicial reviews, Privy Council cases- Ultimate Appeal Court for parts of the Commonwealth, as well as, regulatory cases and inquiries.

Mark practices before every level of court in England and Wales and also abroad before international tribunals and courts. He is also a Privy Council agent regularly working with a range of overseas lawyers. Mark is a qualified mediator.

Kashif Syed

Associate, Beck Greener

Kashif is an experienced trade mark attorney with a number of years of post-qualification practice. He is also a qualified Higher Courts Trade Mark Litigator with enhanced rights of audience before the UK courts. Kashif works with clients ranging from well-known multinationals through to SMEs, operating in a variety of sectors.

Kashif advises on all aspects of trade mark law, including the filing and prosecution of trade mark applications through to registration. He also regularly handles contentious proceedings before intellectual property offices, such as opposition, revocation and invalidity actions, as well as advising and representing clients in infringement matters and the enforcement of trade mark rights before the UK courts. Kashif also has a growing practice in the fields of copyright and designs.

Vernon Dennis

Partner, Howard Kennedy

A highly experienced specialist in business transformation, Vernon has over 25 years’ experience designing and implementing financial recovery and restructuring plans for business clients and is Head of the Business Recovery and Reconstruction group at Howard Kennedy.  

Leading our specialist group of experts he utilises the full resources available from within the firm, whether tax, employment, banking or real estate to provide pragmatic and commercially driven solutions for clients. And where applicable, he works in collaboration with leading industry experts.

Known for his technical expertise, but for making the complex, simple, Vernon advises insolvency practitioners, creditors, and debtors on a wide range of corporate recovery, reconstruction, and business rescue issues, both domestically and cross-border. He specialises in strategic and advisory support for company boards when planning programmes of business turnaround, restructuring, or transformation.

He has extensive experience in retail and restaurant distress, property portfolio restructuring, and cases known for their technical complexity.

Vernon is a Fellow of R3 (The Association of Business Recovery Professionals). A regular lecturer and commentator on insolvency, he is author of The New Law of Insolvency (2003), Insolvency Law Handbook (1st Ed 2005; 2nd Ed 2007 and 3rd Ed 2013), Administration (2010), Liquidation (2011), and Bankruptcy (2012). These have all been published by The Law Society.

2021 sees the fourth edition of his Insolvency Law Handbook published by The Law Society. This step-by-step guide carefully explains each of the main insolvency processes, highlighting the key decisions to be made, the options available and the potential pitfalls. The handbook continues to act as an essential asset for professionals called upon to advise debtors faced with personal or corporate insolvency, or their creditors.

If you would like to purchase the book, please visit The Law Society Bookshop.

Ben Bidnell

Principal, Shipleys LLP

Ben looks after the audit and accounting requirements of fast growing entrepreneurial businesses, which often need to draw on his corporate finance experience to move forward effectively. His expertise in this area includes financial and commercial due diligence, both for business owners contemplating an acquisition and lenders looking at a borrowing request, debt finance and restructuring and advising on the process of floating on markets such as AIM and Plus.

Leigh Sayliss

Partner, Memery Crystal

Kelly Ricketts

Senior Tax Manager, EY Frank Hirth

Kelly joined EY Frank Hirth in 2007, and has a depth of experience in both US and UK taxation providing a wide range of advisory, and business and personal tax compliance services. Many of her clients are entrepreneurs with Owner Managed Businesses and she has extensive experience in providing business tax advice to overseas companies, partnerships and individuals wishing to operate and reside within the UK. Kelly additionally works closely with companies and key individuals outside of both the UK and US, developing and reviewing transfer pricing and branch profit attribution policies.

Walter Andreoni

Partner, Mercanti e Associati

Walter Andreoni joined the Studio as a partner in 2017 and deals with all areas of tax law, including in particular corporation taxation, international taxation, transfer prices and Community VAT.

After completing his degree in Economics at the University of Turin, Walter specializes in attending Master's (LL.M.) International Tax Law at the University of Leiden, Netherlands and has worked for several years with Studio Maisto e Associati.

He is a lecturer in primary post-university specialization courses on international taxation issues, author of tax publications and rapporteur at national and international conferences.

Philip Baker KC, OBE

Field Court Tax Chambers

Philip Baker KC joined Chambers in 1987, having been a full-time lecturer in law at London University from 1979 until then. He has maintained some links with academia, and is now a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London.  He took silk in 2002.

He specialises primarily in international aspects of taxation, which covers both corporate and private client matters. He has a particular interest in taxation and the European Convention on Human Rights, and is the author of a book on Double Taxation Conventions.  He has appeared in cases before courts and tribunals at virtually every level from the Special Commissioners (now the Tax Tribunal) to the House of Lords, Privy Council and European Court of Justice.

He is a former member of the Council of the Chartered Institute of Taxation, and remains a member of several committees of the CIOT and of the International Tax Sub-Committee of the Law Society.  He is a member of the UK Committee of the International Fiscal Association and a member of the Permanent Scientific Committee of IFA.

He is married with twin sons and a younger daughter.  His children are now too old for bedtime stories, but his ambition is to get home each night in time to prise them away from various screens and get them to bed.
In 1997 he was awarded an OBE for work with Chinese political refugees in the UK.

Catherine Jewell

Partner, Beck Greener

Catherine Jewell is a Partner at Beck Greener LLP and provides patent-related services in the chemical field, from initial advice on patentability, to drafting and filing applications and their prosecution, including opposition and appeals. She has a particular interest in the new unitary patent system which is expected to come into force in Europe in 2017.

She is also a Chartered and European Trade Mark Attorney and has advised on a variety of issues in relation to the use and registration of marks, from clearance searches and pre-filing advice, through to opposition and invalidity/revocation actions.

The majority of her experience relates to European patent and trade mark applications, but she has also handled global portfolios covering countries such as the US, China, Korea, Japan and Canada.

Catherine worked in solid-state and materials chemistry before joining the IP profession, concentrating on the synthesis of inorganic materials and manipulation of their structure and properties.

Evgeny Protasenko

Managing Partner, Tidal Wave Ltd

Evgeny has a BS in Applied Physics and Maths, MS in CS.  He switched to finance and spent 10 years in international M&A before getting back to tech in 2018.

He co-founded HPC Hub (rocketcompute.com), moved to SF and got admitted to Alchemist Accelerator Class XXI (the
top accelerator in Silicon Valley for b2b startups).  In parallel, he's advised other startups on matters of global strategy, relocation to the US, and fundraising strategy, which led to the founding of Tidal Wave, an investment syndicate focussed on early-stage startups.

In 3 years, Tidal Wave has invested in 11 companies ~$6.2m (incl. HyPoint, xRobotics, Abagy, GPU Audio, gauss.money, primeclass.io, etc).

In 09/2022 he exited his first investment, HyPoint (took a CFO role for 6 months to manage the deal).  Since then, he has focused on raising our first fund, focussed on early-stage deep tech. Fund’s main focus: Energy transition, Robotics & Real-life AI, Biomanufacturing & Agritech.

Neil Lancaster

Private Client Tax, Blick Rothenberg

Neil works with primarily with Entrepreneurs and High net worth individuals in relation to the personal tax affairs, those of their businesses and other structures often providing solutions to complex tax and commercial problems.

Giorgio Vagnoni

Partner at LAWP

Giorgio's practice mainly focuses on commercial contracts and corporate law. He gained extensive experience in the sale and purchase of membership interests, joint ventures and corporate finance transactions, both domestic and cross-border. His areas of expertise also include the protection of personal assets and family businesses.
 

Lecturer at Master Courses on Tax Law organized by the Business School of Il Sole 24 Ore. He is also a speaker in training seminars and professional classes on commercial law.
 

He holds a Master degree in Business Law from LUISS G. Carli and a LL.M. in International Business Law from Queen Mary University of London.  Admitted to the Milan Bar Association.