Howard is a tax partner in our London office and helps clients with general corporate tax and tax planning advice.
Howard has experience advising organisations in the financial institutions, energy, utilities and TMT sectors, in capital markets and securitisations, local and cross-border mergers and acquisitions, corporate restructurings and demergers and infrastructure. Howard also handles tax disputes work, having acted in hearings before the Court of Appeal and the European Court of Justice.
Accolades
He is a former vice chairman of the Corporation Tax Sub-Committee of the Law Society's Revenue Law Committee.
Howard is regularly cited as a leading individual in Tax in the legal directories. Chambers UK highlights that "his judgement is key, you can really trust his advice," and Legal 500 calls him a "real star performer as regards structuring corporate transactions".
He was inducted in 2018 as a member of the Legal 500 Hall of Fame for Corporate Tax.
Background
Howard has been a partner at the firm since 2001.
Experience & expertise
Selected matters
- Capital and Counties Properties (Capco) on its all share merger with Shaftesbury PLC, bringing together some of London's most iconic destinations in the West End to create an estate valued at £5 billion
- Comcast on a joint venture between its subsidiary NBCUniversal (NBCU) and the MultiChoice Group, Africa's biggest pay TV company. The UK-incorporated joint venture will operate a streaming service through NBCU's Peacock platform
- Sky
- on the competing offers for the company from 21st Century Fox and Comcast resulting in the recommended £30 billion takeover by Comcast
- on its sale of a controlling stake in its online betting and gaming business, Sky Bet, to CVC Capital Partners in a deal which values Sky Bet at £800 million and on the subsequent sale of its remaining stake to The Stars Group Inc. in return for cash and share consideration totalling c. £635 million
- on its up to £7 billion acquisition of Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland from Twenty-First Century Fox
- EDF and NNB on all aspects of their nuclear new build programme in the UK, including the Hinkley Point C project
- TSB and Sabadell on the intra-group project to migrate TSB from its existing IT services platform to a new platform provided by Sabadell Information Systems
- the Bazalgette Consortium on its successful bid to become the Infrastructure Provider for the £4.2 billion "super sewer" Thames Tideway Tunnel project
- TUI Travel on the £4.8 billion cross border merger with TUI AG to create the world's largest integrated leisure tourism group
- Resolution
- on its £8.6 billion merger with Friends Provident
- on the competing £4.9 billion bid by a consortium of Standard Life and Swiss Re, which was subsequently recommended and on another competing bid of £5 billion by a consortium of Pearl and Royal London, which was also subsequently recommended
- major international insurer on the acquisition of Irish Life
- TSB Bank plc on its separation from the Lloyds Banking Group, its £1.3 billion IPO and its long-term outsourced IT and business service arrangements with Lloyds post-IPO
- Lloyds Banking Group on its £560 million sale of Scottish Windows Investment Partnership to Aberdeen Asset Management
- owners of Harrods (Al Fayed Family Trust) on the sale of the Harrods Group to Qatar Holdings LLC
- EDF
- on the £5.8 billion sale of its network distribution assets in the UK
- on its £12.5 billion takeover of British Energy Group
- on the £2.3 billion sale of a 20% interest in its British Energy business to Centrica and its plans to build new nuclear reactors in the UK
- Virgin Group on its disposal of a 31% stake in Virgin Atlantic to Air France-KLM for £220 million and the resulting three-party joint venture between them and Delta Air Lines
Sectors
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