BLP hires Jonathan Levy and Andrew Watter to further boost Contentious Tax Team
Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) has followed up the recruitment of high profile contentious tax partner Liesl Fichardt with the appointment of two further contentious tax experts as part of strategic moves to continue to expand BLP’s tax capabilities.
Jonathan Levy and Andrew Watters currently head up Levy Watters, a specialist tax controversy consultancy. It helps companies and high net worth individuals minimise the likelihood of disputes with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), and assists them with settlements and litigation. Prior to setting up independently, Jonathan, who joins BLP as a partner, was head of tax litigation at Ernst & Young and a senior legal officer at the Inland Revenue, where he was the deputy head of the international tax group. Andrew, who will be a director, also spent three years at Ernst & Young as a senior consultant. Previously he worked for ten years as a senior investigator in the special compliance office of Inland Revenue, where he dealt with high profile cases of serious tax avoidance and evasion.
They will work with Liesl, one of the leading lawyers acting on the multinational Group Litigation Order cases that are challenging major aspects of the UK tax system on the basis of incompatibility with EU law. She is set to start with BLP at the beginning of December having recently been recruited from Dorsey and Whitney. The new team will substantially enhance BLP’s already strong contentious tax capabilities and will work alongside other top ranked individuals in the group’s team of over 30 lawyers specialising in tax issues.
The three new recruits are the latest to join BLP’s rapidly expanding Tax group at a time when the firm has identified the area as one of five strategic pillars of legal expertise, sitting alongside its other major practice areas in Corporate, Finance, Real Estate and Litigation and Dispute Resolution. Other recent recruits to the firm’s Tax team include the new Head of Tax Michael Wistow, one of the leading tax lawyers in the UK who joined in September from Clifford Chance, and Neal Todd, a highly regarded corporate tax expert who came from Linklaters last year.
Michael Wistow said: “Bringing in three highly experienced and respected contentious tax individuals shows how serious we are about our ambition to build on our already strong transactional and personal tax and trusts capabilities. We believe that the breadth and depth of our tax capabilities will be unique in the legal market.”
Neville Eisenberg, BLP’s Managing Partner, said: “We are making rapid progress in developing our tax capability, which is a key element of our strategy.”