Advice Is Key

With about 1,600 skilled professionals originating from 35 different countries, PricewaterhouseCoopers is the leading firm in assurance, advisory and tax services in Luxembourg. The firm, which is present in all the country’s economic sectors, has developed a multidisciplinary approach in order to serve industrial, commercial and services companies. Over the past three years, PwC Luxembourg has significantly increased its client base while developing at the same time a wide range of new services. More particularly, tax advisory services have been one of its best performing activity. How could this performance be explained?

“The reason to those outstanding results is twofold”, Wim Piot, head of Tax at PwC Luxembourg explains. “While an increasing number of international firms choose to establish their headquarters in Luxembourg in order to optimise their financial structure, local firms of all sectors also express a growing demand for tax advice.”

Moreover the size of the firm could also justify that growth as it has enabled PwC to set up dedicated teams and approaches recognised by the market. That’s why within the tax department of PwC Luxembourg – which gathers more than 350 people among which 23 partners – specialized groups have been created to explore two high-potential sectors: alternative investments and international tax structuring.

Keep clients’ solutions practical

A dedicated tax team intends to service the alternative investment sector, and its performance has been increasingly remarkable since its creation three years ago. In addition, groups have been set up to specifically serve sub-sectors such as real estate, private equity and hedge funds clients.

To PwC’s tax partner Wim Piot, one of the main objectives of that dedicated team is to look for an absolute best quality of service.
“Working with the qualified and necessary resources during a period of strong growth in the market place has enabled us to give full support and excellent response times to our clients who tend to be deal-driven and who were turning to PwC to fill gaps in their own resources. Therefore absolute best quality of service was and still is at the top of our agenda.”

Over the last five years, PwC Luxembourg has accumulated a highly-qualified expertise in the alternative investment sector, mainly due to its broad client portfolio. As M. Piot acknowledges,
this expertise is key to finding the right solutions for clients. “We’ve always tried to keep our solutions practical, simple and easy for the client to implement and operate. ”

This experience also helps PwC to continue innovating and refining clients’ structures. “Based on our extensive experience we are able to “read across” from a situation we know to another one with similarities, and to decide what should or should not be acceptable when seeking advanced tax agreements. In the meantime, we are driven by the constant concern of protecting the reputation of Luxembourg's financial place by ensuring that no dubious tax plannings could soil it” , M. Piot says.

Expand people’s knowledge

The international tax structuring activities represent the second high potential business development sector. As such, a specialised team has already handled some worldwide major acquisition structuring, post-acquisition structuring and group reorganisation projects. “On top of being involved in the conception and implementation of international tax structures at the request of foreign offices and international clients, we also try to bring Luxembourg on the foreground as a relevant location for traditional and modern-economy types of business activities”, M. Piot adds.

Expending on-board tax knowledge is thus essential for the professionals involved in the ITS group, especially as PwC Luxembourg Tax department recorded some business developments in the US, but also in China, India and in the Middle East . “In terms of resources, we try to diverse the backgrounds of our experts and enhance regular exchanges, contacts and visits to foreign offices in the countries that they are dealing with when conceiving and implementing tax structures”.

As a conclusion, Wim Piot underlines the importance, for the tax business as a whole, to maintain a close relationship with clients. “It is really important to understand the particular situations that our clients are facing and allow them to stay ahead in developing new solutions, which is consistently required in an environment of rapid changing tax legislation worldwide.”