Family Settlements & Their Perplexities

Course Duration:
165 minutes comprising of 2 episodes

Course Background:
As family businesses and relationship circles get larger and more complex, wealth-related disputes become more common wherein, parties often seek to separate commercial control, ownership and interests and achieve greater independence. This brings to the fore the significance of “family settlements”, which allow families to achieve these objectives amicably while preserving their values and honouring the wishes of all family members.

In a nutshell, a family settlement is an agreement where family members mutually work out how properties (personal or business) should get distributed/ partitioned among themselves, with requisites being that all parties should be related to each other and must have a claim to a share of the disputed property. Further, the inclusion of business assets in the family-wealth pool and interplay of family members who are active in the business versus passive family members only complicates the partition of family wealth, more so in relation to listed companies. Family Settlements are often viewed as a more amicable, quicker and pocket-friendly solution, as against, protracted, public and messy court battles which in no way may guarantee a satisfactory resolution.

What shall the course cover?
Against this backdrop, Taxsutra is glad to unveil a distinctive course on the theme of, “Perplexities of Family Settlements Involving Business Entities, Regulatory & Tax Aspects” in conjunction with tax & regulatory affairs expert Mr. Ketan Dalal (Managing Partner, Katalyst Advisors). In this course, Mr. Dalal has dissected complex issues of family dynamics in the light of plethora of judicial precedents and also highlighted multiple scenarios involving business entities.

Few situations/issues that are discussed in the course include the following:

A.   With Regards to the Fundamentals of a Family Arrangement:

• Criticalities if families are jointly running businesses
• Is the intent to remain together or separate?
• Identification of wealth mix and peculiarities vis-à-vis various kinds of assets (i.e. business assets, passive investments, jewelry, immovable properties etc.)
• Commercial Considerations
• Governing business relationships between the families, both at the time of and post family arrangement

B.   With Regards to Involvement of Business Entities:  

• Several softer issues, including who can run what business, comfort of key employees, perception and comfort of vendors and customers, complexities
• Necessity of group restructurings (through mergers/ demergers, share/ business sale demergers, etc.) 
• Interplay of commercial imperatives vis-à-vis tax, fiscal and regulatory aspects