Private Wealth: Advising high net worth individuals for over 40 years
Memery Crystal as a firm has been advising high net worth individual clients for over 40 years. It is what drove our founders and remains an integral part of our business.
We handle business, investment and property affairs for landed estates, successful entrepreneurs and family offices of all size and creeds.
Your teams
Leigh SaylissPartner, Head of Tax
Contact Leigh Sayliss
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Nicola KravitzPartner, Head of Real Estate
Daniel TunkelPartner, Head of Financial Regulation
How we can help
Our experience comes with an acute understanding that the way in which you meet your goals and address your concerns as an individual and family are markedly different from corporate and institutional clients. Often we act for a family business or successful entrepreneur and focus on their business interests: we are in fact renowned for doing so. When the time comes to change gear and focus on your personal and family affairs, we change tact.
Sensitive approach
You and your family require discretion and a sensitive approach underpinned by an astute, commercial sense of getting you to where you want to get to. You demand practical, robust planning anchored in experience of similar circumstances and pragmatism, not rigid, unrealistic proposals spanning pages of legalese. Experience is key in delivering on that promise.
Personal relationship
We like to reciprocate and make our relationship personal to you when advising on your personal and family affairs. We like to meet you and understand you and your family before we make any proposals. Face-to-face meetings start and foster our relationships. They make our advice more tangible and understandable.
Taxation
We gear our tax advice and make it relevant to you and your family. Tax affairs are complex but the solutions presented do not need to be. The tax tail should not wag the dog and we agree. Experience helps us to navigate complex tax issues to present you with practical solutions orientated around your family’s needs.
A genuine strength of our team is its mix of personal and corporate tax specialists working together to make sure there are no tax issues missed.
Offshore Affairs & Structuring
Our clients are increasingly concerned with asset protection strategies: how, where and for whom assets are held. The choice of jurisdiction and structures are vast: the appropriate ones few. We navigate through the options for you, presenting you only with ones suited to your circumstances.
Our team has worked inside and for trust and corporate service providers. Armed with first-hand knowledge we do not just advise on, but execute and oversee the implementation of any advice we are engaged on.
Family Governance
Wealth brings opportunity while at the same time presenting difficult judgement calls for families to make.
Your family governance is enormously sensitive. A purely technical legal approach is entirely inappropriate and can never address on its own issues such as shareholders’ agreements; tailoring articles of association, creating family charters and councils and devolving control across the generations. It is nuanced.
Your plan is at the centre of our instructions: this steers our approach and our proposals to you and your family.
Philanthropy & Charitable Giving
Whether you are keen to leave a legacy in a Will or create a standalone charity, we will discuss the options with you and assist in developing a philanthropic strategy which will support your way of thinking.
Recent matters
- Advising on the restructure of a significant UK real estate portfolio held in a variety of non-UK trusts, foundations and company structures for the benefit of a family whose long term residence shifted to the UK.
- Introducing a family governance methodology to a structure established for the benefit of a high net worth South American entrepreneurial family taking into account the differing involvement different parts of the family have in the different aspects of the businesses.
- Providing UK and co-ordinating overseas tax advice in connection with the investment into a significant UK-based student accommodation portfolio by a group of Middle East-based family offices.
- Advising a HNWI in relation to a complex Group restructuring in preparation for the sale of part of his international advertising and PR group to The Interpublic Group (NASDAQ) and The Havas Group (Paris Bourse).
- Advising on the structure of a fund designed to lend to UK-based real estate projects so as to reduce overall tax leakage in respect of funds loaned.
- Advising on tax compliance issues and restructuring of assets in light of legal, tax and regulatory changes in France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and impending U.S. compliance requirements.
- Advising on various high value residential purchases in a very short timescale to meet the clients’ aims of completing prior to the increase of the SDLT rate.
- Restructuring the estate of an UK domiciled individual, post-death, to better accommodate the future estate planning of the surviving spouse who planned to leave the UK.
- Acted for a new overseas family office acquiring four investment properties, three in prime central London, one in a prime south-east location (£130m).
- Acted for an overseas family office in relation to the acquisition of a high profile asset which was owned by Standard Life (£26m).