Selected Mandates

A founder had spent three decades developing a manufacturing business and retained a substantial interest after a partial sale brought in external investors. The question was how future ownership should work without blurring the line between the company and expectations within the family that had never been put in writing.

We started by reviewing the existing holding structure and the shareholder agreements already in place, then spent time understanding what the founder genuinely wanted for the next stage of his involvement. What emerged was a gap between the legal paperwork and the family’s assumptions about how authority would eventually pass – the kind of gap that only becomes visible once someone sits down and asks the right questions.

Closing it meant coordinating specialist advice across ownership, governance, tax and fiduciary matters, working alongside the founder’s existing legal counsel and a fiduciary structuring specialist we brought in for this purpose. A holding entity was established to separate day-to-day operating decisions from ownership rights, giving the founder a way to transfer economic interest gradually while keeping a hand on strategic direction for a defined period.

Two years on, the framework still guides decisions around board composition and dividend policy. For a family navigating a considerable amount of change, it has become the fixed point everyone refers back to.

A client with residences in Austria, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, alongside commercial property and a diversified investment portfolio, wanted a clearer view of arrangements that had built up over almost twenty years of international life. Each jurisdiction came with its own reporting obligations, and the advisers handling them had rarely, if ever, spoken to one another.

Each of those advisers was individually capable and well regarded. The trouble was that no single person held the full picture. Our role was to bring their work into a shared framework. From there, it became far easier to see which matters actually needed attention first.

We led a detailed review of ownership structures, local reporting requirements, residence considerations and fiduciary arrangements across all four jurisdictions, and found several areas where overlapping structures were creating unnecessary duplication. What followed was a practical programme of work with clear responsibilities assigned to each adviser, supported by a consolidated reporting format the client had never had before.

The client now sees, in one place, matters that used to be scattered across four countries and half a dozen professional relationships. We remain the point of contact for directing that wider arrangement, meeting quarterly with the client and twice a year with the full adviser group to keep the structure working as circumstances change.

A client had inherited a substantial estate from a parent some years earlier and wanted to give it a clearer sense of purpose than the original arrangements provided. The mandate covered a property portfolio spanning three generations, a private investment portfolio split across two institutions, philanthropic interests the client wanted to formalise and long-standing commitments to extended family members that had always been handled informally.

Understanding the estate took several months of conversations, both about the assets and about the reasoning behind decisions earlier generations had made. Along the way, a number of assumptions buried in older legal structures turned out to no longer reflect the client’s genuine priorities.

From there, we coordinated the advisers needed to build a governance framework suited to the estate’s scale. Investment oversight was reviewed across both institutions, and we put in place suitable structures for the philanthropic work the client wanted to pursue. A family council was proposed to formalise decisions around the property portfolio, with clear roles set out for the client and other beneficiaries.

What resulted was a structure that finally matched intentions the client had held for a long time without a practical way to act on them. The philanthropic arm alone has since supported several initiatives connected to causes the client’s parent had championed for decades.