In any corporate restructuring, there are substantial transaction costs involved. It is therefore beneficial to early and quickly identify possible savings from available exemptions or reliefs. For example, in share or property transfers within a group of companies, there is the Section 15A stamp duty relief for transfers between associated companies. Section 15 duty relief is available for company reconstructions and amalgamations, especially useful for share listings or to create a corporate group from common share ownerships. In the latter case, we formed a corporate group from family-owned individual companies and successfully obtained Section 15 stamp duty relief for the share transfers. In addition, because some of the companies were real property companies, we studied the RPC histories of the RPCs and timed their share transfer after the 5th year of ownership for zero RPGT for the individual disposers. We saved the client quite a bit of money.
