The event was a joint seminar on private wealth management held at the Grand Hotel and organised jointly by the Jersey offices of Swiss banking group UBS and accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Outlining the main changes to the Jersey tax structure over the next five years, Jane Stubbs, senior tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said that although under the new regime legitimate tax planning would be ‘more of a challenge’, by no means would it be impossible.
Mrs Stubbs said since the 1990s there had already been a gradual freezing of personal allowances, with interest relief on mortgages and loans restructured last year.
Still to come, from 2006, was the pay-as-you-earn ITIS and the ‘20% means 20%’ measures for higher earners, with a goods and services tax from 2008, and finally, in 2009, the introduction of zero/ten corporate tax and look-through provisions for directors and shareholders.
The major difference, said Mrs Stubbs, was that whereas now the burden of taxation was evenly spread between businesses and individual taxpayers, in future the balance would be increased considerably for individuals, from 49% to 62%, raising an additional £48 million in revenue.
