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Dear members,

Welcome to the first IBA Taxes Committee eBulletin of 2021. We hope this year can bring new beginnings as the world begins to take its first tentative steps out of the most difficult parts of the Covid-19 pandemic. Torsten Engers has now stepped down as the Committee’s Newsletter Editor and we would like to thank him for doing a fantastic job in taking the Committee’s publications forward. Jessica Kemp at Travers Smith in London will be taking over this role, so do please contact her with any submissions to the eBulletin. She would be delighted to consider any contributions and is excited about keeping this thriving technical community together through the eBulletin.

Covid-19 made 2020 a complex and challenging year for all of us, including for the IBA Taxes Committee. However, thanks to the hard work and leadership of Margriet Lukkien – from Loyens & Loeff in the Netherlands – as Senior Co-Chair of the Taxes Committee, we were able to deliver another successful and inspiring year for our members despite the very challenging, uncertain and ever-changing times. The IBA leadership distinguished our hard work as ‘example setting’ during the year-end meeting held with the LPD leadership in December, so congratulations to Margriet for an extraordinary job!

As anticipated, Margriet stepped down as Senior Co-Chair of the Taxes Committee on 31 December 2020. Reto Heuberger of Homburger in Switzerland comes in as Junior Co-Chair of the Taxes Committee. We are very pleased to have Reto on board as a new Co-Chair.

We want to thank Margriet for her extraordinary work and strong leadership as a Co-Chair and as an officer of the IBA Taxes Committee throughout all these years. Fortunately, we will continue working with her; she will certainly be missed, in particular for her kindness, humour and hard work. Working with Margriet has been an enriching, inspiring and joyful experience. We are in the fortunate position that we know where to find her for any advice we need.

2021 is proceeding at a fast pace, so we wanted to take advantage of this message to get you up to speed and invite you to continue supporting the Taxes Committee.

• The IBA Taxes Committee’s work has been recognised by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), for its work in the Pillar One and Two public consultation submissions. Pia Dorfmueller represented our Committee in the Pillar Two public consultation held on 15 January. If you have not seen the public consultation, please have a look here.
• The virtual edition of the 10th IBA London Finance and Capital Markets Tax Conference has been a great success. It began on 18 January and runs until 24 February 2021.
• The date has been set for the 21st Annual US and Europe Tax Practice Trends Conference, which again will be co-sponsored by the American Bar Association Section of Taxation and the United States Branch of the International Fiscal Association (IFA-USA), and which will feature the active involvement of the OECD. The virtual conference will be held from 22 March through 25 March 2021. We will provide you with an update on the conference topics and speakers shortly, but it promises to be a powerful line-up, so please mark your calendars.
• Covid-19 will continue to be present during 2021. At this time, we are planning for a virtual 13th Annual US-Latin America Tax Practice Trends Conference. This conference is jointly hosted with the ABA and IFA-USA.
• As you may know, for 2021 we have added the role of ‘Webinar Officer’ to the Committee. Joe Duffy kindly accepted taking on this function and we are certain he will do a wonderful job. The plan is that webinars will run quarterly. These will not be your traditional run-of-the-mill-panel-style webinars but rather open-mic forums for discussion. We will choose a hot topic (preferably related to tax!) in advance and ask nominated ‘Discussion Leaders’ to present a number of questions, scenarios or issues. One of the advantages of this format is that it should not take up a huge amount of preparation time for the Discussion Leaders. Indeed, one of the goals of the programme will be to allow as many people as possible to contribute and to feel part of the IBA Taxes Committee community. For Q1 and Q2 the hottest of hot topics are clearly the ongoing discussions on Pillars One and Two, particularly given the fantastic work conducted on OECD submissions by the IBA Taxes Committee last year. So keep an eye out for our invitation to join these new sessions and be prepared to join the discussions!
• We anticipate that The New Era of Taxation conference will again be a success in its virtual setting. We will be reaching out to many of you to join the planning board for this conference. If you want to volunteer for this task, please let us know.

As you can see, we are planning for virtual conferences through October. Although we are cautiously optimistic and hope to see all of you in Paris, we do need to keep in mind that safety is our priority and keeping our Taxes Committee community together and actively involved is key. So please, join our sessions and events during 2021!

Kind regards,

 

Ricardo Leon-Santacruz

Co-Chair, IBA Taxes Committee

rls@sanchezdevanny.com

 

Reto Heuberger

Co-Chair, IBA Taxes Committee

reto.heuberger@homburger.ch

 

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