WalEkman International Advokat & Lawyer Group Specialized in Corporate Tax and Divorce Law

PROVIDING YOU WITH PLENTY OF ADVANTAGES

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STATE-OF-THE-LAW JURISPRUDENCE

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BUILDING BRIDGES FOR THE ENTREPRENEUR

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CONSTRUING LEGAL TASK FORCES

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VALUES WORTH SHARING

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INDIVIDUAL RECOGNITION

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JUDGEMENT AND CONTEXT

Claes Reinhold Ekman, Chairman of WalEkman International Corporate / Business Tax and Divorce Law and Lawyer Group.

WalEkman Advokat & Lawyer Group Specialized in Corporate Taxation and Divorce Law

www.walekman.com           www.walekman-advokat-lawyer-corporate-business-tax-divorce-law.com           

”We must find some other source of legitimate political power,” wrote John Locke. The answer he proposed is a form of social contract. By making a pact to join together and form a community, men lay foundations of political power, which is then exercised on their behalf by a ruler or government. The authority of a ruler thus derives from a type of contract freely entered into by his subjects, and is neither imposed by God nor based on brute force. 

Traces of the notion of a social contract can be found scattered throughout the history of Western thought. Thus Antiphon, an Athenian thinker in the fifth century BC, said that “the laws of men are fixed by agreement”, and the character of Glaucon in Plato’s Republic explained that people “determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one another, neither to commit nor to suffer injustice, and ... this is the beginning of legislation and of covenants between men....” 

The Greeks seem to have thought that before such covenants were made, life was brutal and solitary, and people banded together for protection against animals. According to a version of this tale from the first century BC, “the first men to be born, they say, led an undisciplined and bestial life, setting out one by one to secure their sustenance and taking for their food both the tenderest herbs and the fruits of wild trees. Then, since they were attacked by wild beasts, they came to each other’s aid, being instructed by expediency, and when gathered together in this way by reason of their fear, they gradually came to recognize their mutual characteristics.” 

Adam Smith generously wrote that Hume was, as far as he knew, the first writer to draw attention to the fact that the development of commerce and manufacturing tended to promote liberty and good government. For a long time now, however, politicians in the Western world have been dancing round the same handbag; the policy differences have been largely rhetorical. Politicians have always strayed from the truth, but shame kept them in the general postcode. Our vision is of a more liberal, open and less regulated Europe, trading freely around the globe and no longer held back by a bureaucratic and stagnant EU; with fees of lawyers, accountants and bankers acting as a tax on corporate activity that corrodes value. 

WalEkman Lawyer Group call ourselves an Entrepreneurial Advocacy. We set out to show how desperately Europe and the United States - in the 21st century - need prime movers, and how viciously they treat them. And we will show it; what happens to Europe and the United States without them.

(To be continued . / ..)

Within our global law firm - creating legal / economic task forces at various and different situations - key sectors are:

Corporate / business and private taxation issues in Europe, USA and worldwide.

Corporate / business and private legal issues at the European Court of  Justice; often originating in lower  courts.

The formation of international / off-  shore corporate and private structures for entrepreneurs.

The efficient, effective and fair handling of high net worth divorces; corporate and private.

Strategic business litigation and  arbitration in Europe, USA and  globally.

Legal Councellor Claes Ekman's Wallenberg scholarship received for legal academic research at universities in Beijing, China and Tokyo, Japan; in today's value $115,000.00.

Legal Councellor Claes Ekman's University Examination Diploma.

Legal Councellor Claes Ekman at a recent recruitment venue for an additional legal attorney / Artificial Intelligence - AI - Machine Learning / Europe.

Legal Councellor Claes Ekman's International Society of Financial Analysts /  U.S. Financial Analysts Federation Charter.

WalEkman Legal Library - WELL - has one of Europe's and USA's largest legal book treasures. Some pieces are written in-house, most obviously not.

Special Disclaimer:
"We are not attorneys in all jurisdictions where we operate. Concentrating on marital and corporate tax and global company formation issues, we work with own partners, as well as with independent lawyers, around the world to solve complex international family and corporate / company law issues."

"PANTHA RHEI" - Be legally prepared!

Legal preparedness is the key to success and victory.

The recognized leader in the mergers & aqcuisitions advisory field, in business intelligence, in corporate finance... We have initiated, advised on and implemented the largest ever Swedish/European/U.S. global acquisitions in the meat/slaughter industry (Scan), in the recruitment sector (Manpower), and in security services (Securitas - parent company of Pinkerton), amongst a great many transactions during the last three decades. We cover most global commercial fields - in Europe, the Americas and Asia - including IT, life sciences, manufacturing, retail, communications, technology, professional services, et al.

WalEkman has close liason and cooperation with banks and founding accountants in all these fine locations.

Dubai

Delaware

British Virgin Islands

Lichtenstein

Hong Kong

Moscow

(continued .. / ..)

We ask, for example, if the European-American relationship is a "friendship or a mere partnership". Partnership implies a cynical "mathematics of interests", so we might prefer friendship. However, a recent decision by the European Commission, the EU's executive, told Apple to cough up $14.5 billion, plus interest, in unpaid taxes; a move that [some] American politicians denounced as a "tax grab". The ruling is part of a broader assault on tax planning, led by Europe.

European countries have been closely involved in efforts to create international consensus on how to close loopholes in cross-border taxation. These are led by the OECD, and are known as the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project. The 112 participating countries agreed on a set of reforms last year, but implementation is patchy. Some see the commission's ruling on Apple as a sign that it has little faith in BEPS. The judgement certainly complicates international tax diplomacy.

Washington criticised the Apple ruling, calling it "unfair". It had warned that it might retaliate in some way if Brussels went ahead. It argues that the commission is trying to turn itself into a "supranational tax authority", threatening the consensus achieved through BEPS on the crucial "arm's-length principle" at the heart of transfer-pricing rules. These govern the prices that subsidiaries of a multinational in different countries charge each other for the products and services that flow between them.

These BEPS arrangements will be challenged, appeals that could take a decade or more to grind through the courts. Some [one] lawyer recently described the commission's actions as "legal mumbo-jumbo" and poor maths. For constructive and creative company builders - caught between a rock and a hard place; facing a bureaucratic Voldemort - bear in mind we specialize successfully in international corporate taxation.

"In order to stay still, you should run twice as fast as that," Alice formulated it in Wonderland. The double entendres and incompetence of the European Commission outrun its malevolence, and either you address an issue yourself or it will be done for you, albeit, trying to sell Washington the same horse twice might not work. It (Brussels) will find that ineptitude and inconsistency are not quite the same as inaction.

If the bureaucrats wish to keep a cat's paw in the legal darkness they should have set straight themselves a long time ago, we realize - and here I can speak with some authority - there is no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum. Dutiful dullards frequently end up better regarded than talented chancers, however, we have seen neither here. Remember, there is still honour, if not glory, in making the best of a bad job.  

Admiration is a form of inverted envy, and this is what I have and feel for all those entrepreneurial individuals out there in the ball-game of life, being bold and taking risks, on behalf of us all, intrinsically not hurting anyone else, and at the behest of no one ... but themselves. Despite dodgy odds, the best entrepreneurs push on. People often persevere, from what I can tell, because they have an almost irrational commitment to a cause.

An entrepreneur - from the French entreprendre, meaning to undertake - is defined as a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable intitiative and risk. We care about entrepreneurs - they may be inventors, but more often than not innovators - and we care especially for young entrepreneurs. There are forces at work in young people, the greatest of which is growth, and they may experience a certain hopeless helplessness, leaving juveniles bitterly acrimonious.

Instinct and law demand of young people obedience. But growth demands disobedience; and here truth and myth may collide, if we are not misreading our meek compatriots completely. Any government or state of society which fails to win for itself some measure of the generosity and loyalty natural to youth is in for grave trouble. And, indeed, experience has proved it: of all forms of breeding, that of human cattle is one of the hardest. The young West glows white-hot with talent, and they are indeed our most valuable asset, surpassing all others by a wide margin. 

Sincerely,

Claes Reinhold Ekman

CLAES REINHOLD EKMAN, Chairman

claes.ekman@walekman.com

EU / European Union Counsellor and U.S. Legal Counsel

EFFICACIOUS CORPORATE TAXATION:

A JUDICIAL PHILOSOPHY

AND TRANSFER PRICE REASONING

2nd edition due March 2022.

AN INHERITANCE BOOM: The UK High Court considered around 180 inheritance disputes in 2018, three times more than it examined a decade earlier. Construe an impeccable will - soft words will break bones, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn expressed it - that is an essential component of your true testament, of your reality. Words mean something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, have something to do with the depth of the relationship we form. After reading your testament parties should feel inadequate, due to the testament's honesty, a truth in the writing that takes their breath away. We have world-leading inheritance, divorce, alimony, prenuptial, tax and real estate experts retained.

"Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe." - Jacques Monod

This is a photograph of Albert Einstein’s untidy desk taken the day after his death. After and beyond physics comes metaphysics; i. e., philosophy. One of the values of philosophy is that throughout its history it has prefigured science, legal and other ones. In turn, I believe, science is well served by recognizing that historical effort. The fact is that the history of philosophy is more the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind than the history of a sharply defined discipline. The traditional image of it as a sort of meditative science or pure thought, strangely cut off from other subjects, is largely a trick of the historical light. The illusion is created by the way in which knowledge tends to be labelled, chopped up and re-labelled. Philosophical work is regularly spirited away and adopted by other disciplines. Yesterday's moral philosophy becomes tomorrow's jurisprudence or welfare economics; yesterday's philosophy of mind becomes tomorrow's cognitive science.

And the road runs in both directions: new inquiries in other disciplines prompt new questions for the philosophically curious. Tomorrow's economics will be meat for the moral philosophers of the day after. One effect of these shifting boundaries is that philosophical thinking can easily seem to be unusually useless, even for an intellectual enterprise. This is largely because any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful ceases to be called philosophy. Hence the illusory appearance that philosophers never make progress. Who remembers, by the way, that Sir Isaac Newton was not a professor of physics, but indeed, a professor of natural philosophy?

No philosophical knowledge of the law can ever be had without reference to its origin and history. He or she who desires to make the law an honorable pursuit – and not a mere trade or calling – must never fail to derive instruction and stimulation from philosophy’s original weighty and earnest words. The earliest notion of law is not an enunciation of a principle, but a judgement in a particular case. Law is stable; society is progressive – and the “law of nations” must not be confounded with international law, or the law between nations.

The alliance of legal counsellors/jurists with philosophers has lasted for millennia, by the single assumption that the old jus gentium (the law common to all nations) was the lost code of nature. The simplicity and symmetry associated with the conception of nature were regarded as the characteristics of a fair, good and decent legal system. The point of contact between the law of nations and the law of nature was equity, or more precisely levelling.

LOGIC, LANGUAGE, TRUTH - and the LAW

CALL US: +46 730 983 700 (Europe) +1 205 2583 700 (USA-Canada-Asia-South America) +380 737 583 700 (Russia-Ukraine) lawyer@walekman.com

The motto, or mantra, of Uppsala University is - "Thinking freely is great, thinking correctly is greater." Noteworthy!

Dr. Igor Galitsky is Special Advisor to our Chairman. Igor has a Ph.D.  in corporate and international  law from the University of Odessa, and handles WalEkman's assignments throughout Eastern and Central Europe, i.e., Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Visegrad Four, et seq.

Claes Ekman on a legal corporate mission in Kiev, Ukraine.

Viktoria Brauschitz is a fully qualified WalEkman lawyer operating throughout Europe on marital issues, child custody, alimony, etc. You will not find Viktoria without "Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch-BGB" in her briefcase.

An early investment by Ekman, but not the last progressive ditto.