Descriptive Notes And Contents List

Tax shelters have traditionally been the preserve of rich families and corporations wanting to turn today's highly taxed income into tomorrow's lowly-taxed capital gains.

Film-making, like forest plantation and high-tech company development, has the key tax shelter characteristic of requiring investment over a period of time, with returns deferred until the film is released. There may also be a long tail of 'rights' income from world-wide distribution, video and dvd sales etc. Classically, films were too risky to be used for tax shelters, but the introduction of completion guarantees and of intermediate media holding companies to spread risk has now overcome that problem.

Forests (expensive to set-up and slow-growing) are also a perfect tax shelter, more especially because they are environmentally friendly. Many countries give beneficial tax treatment to forests, which makes an already tax-efficient investment even more interesting. These reports give a detailed analysis of the tax regime for forestry and its economic basis in six high-tax countries and one offshore jurisdiction.

The 'dotcom' boom and bust has turned venture capital from an arcane corner of the lunatic fringe of investment into a key sector of the corporate capital markets. But it is when incentive tax breaks are added that venture capital investment becomes more than just one investment route among others.

Any investment in a developing company is likely to have some of the characteristics of a tax shelter, ie that the cost of borrowed capital (to invest) is a deductible expense in most countries providing the structure is right, and that returns (and payment of the tax on them) are deferred until an investment is realised. The astronomical returns offered on flotation of many high-tech stocks added gilt to the gingerbread of venture capital investment, and it has recovered strongly from the losses of 2000 and 2001.

In this series, we take a passing glance at the general tax regime for investment in a country, but we concentrate mainly on the tax-privileged venture capital investment regimes in each case.

Tax-Efficient Regimes For Film Production

Introduction			Page Two
Australia			Ireland
Canada			United Kingdom
France			United States
Isle of Man

Tax-Efficient Regimes For Forestry

Introduction
UK			Asia (general)
USA			Hong Kong
Ireland			India
Australia			Taiwan
New Zealand			Japan

United Kingdom
United States
Canada
Australia
Panama
Ireland
New Zealand

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