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Featured in Practical Law, Senior Counsel Kyle Rainsford explores the various tax issues, duties and regimes that are likely to arise in the construction industry.  

I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That's where the fun is.

After months of negotiations, on 14 December, the EU Parliament and Council reached a provisional agreement on the principles that will underpin the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive ("CS3D").

This update provides a brief summary of some notable recent developments from a UK sanctions perspective, including the introduction of the Office of Trade Sanctions Implementation ("OTSI"), which will be tasked with trade sanctions implementation and enforcement in the UK, along with further guidance on a potentially wide interpretation of the "ownership and control" test, and the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation's ("OFSI") 2022-2023 Annual Review.

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In a recent series of cases, HMRC has successfully argued that amounts paid to managers under a remuneration planning arrangement should be subject to income tax as "miscellaneous income". In HMRC v BlueCrest Capital Management LP and other, we now have the Court of Appeal's take on the issue, and it too has supported HMRC's view. 

Welcome to the latest edition of our quarterly disputes newsletter, which covers key developments in the dispute resolution world over the last three months or so.

At the time of our last COP28 update, we were still waiting to hear what the outcomes would be from several key discussion areas that remained open, including the results of the first Global Stocktake ("GST").

As part of the Edinburgh Reforms announced last December, the government launched a consultation on reforming the fund management exemption. Currently, funds are within the exemption if they are either on a UK domestic statutory list of exempt funds or can rely on "direct effect" of EU law (by falling within the EU law concept of "special investment fund").  In the consultation, the government proposed introducing a characteristics based test based on (its view) of the EU law position, with the domestic statutory list being retained but not updated.

In this session from the recent PMI's ESG and Climate Summit (December 2023), Pensions Partner Andy Lewis and Senior Counsel Harriet Sayer looked at how law and regulation, including the recent output from the Taskforce on Social Factors, might help support and guide schemes with moving social factors up the agenda.

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Dispute Resolution Partner Joe Moore and Dispute Resolution Senior Associate Tim Knight have contributed to ThoughtLeaders4 Competition Law & Litigation Magazine. Their article, 'Are the courts passing on category (iii) mitigation defences?' was first published in Issue 3 of the magazine and can be viewed below.

Read the full PMI’s Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) Report 2023 here.

2023 has been a year marked by high inflation and high borrowing costs, which have increased prices and caused uncertainty in the real estate market. Meanwhile, the Government has kept Parliament busy with a range of new legislation, much of which affects the built environment and investment into it.

A regular briefing for the alternative asset management industry. 

The UK government has announced far-reaching changes to the UK's immigration system which are set to be introduced in Spring 2024 as part of a five-point plan. These announcements follow the release of the net migration numbers at the end of November 2023 which showed levels were at an all-time high.

After many months of speculation and preparation, COP28 got underway last week in Dubai. As set out in our article prior to COP28 commencing, the conference comes at a crucial time in collective international efforts to tackle the climate crisis, with King Charles emphasising in his address to the conference that "COP28 will be another critical turning point towards genuine transformational action".

Introduction

SDR is widely seen as the UK's answer to the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR), which is currently under review by the European Commission (in fact, we understand that the Commission has an eye on SDR as part of that review). While narrower in scope than SFDR in some respects, it goes further in others insofar as it provides for a set of formal product labels and imposes minimum standards for labelled­ products and non-labelled products that have ESG-related terms in their names (although some will already be familiar with the FCA's ‘Guiding Principles’ for authorised ESG and sustainable investment funds, which sets out expectations in terms of design, delivery and disclosure in relation to such funds).