Company secretarial
Our experienced and friendly team provide registered office, service address and company secretarial services and have the ability to review your statutory registers ahead of any refinance, investment or disposal you may be considering. We will guide you through company administration and are used to dealing with groups of companies (large and small). We help clients with business requirements that include:
- incorporating companies limited by shares, companies limited by guarantee, limited liability partnerships (LLPs) and 'right to manage' companies for residents of properties
- offering registered office and service address services
- a fixed-fee company secretarial service, keeping up-to-date records on our specialist database and dealing with essential documents (such as Companies House documents and accounts prepared by clients' accountants)
- registering UK branches of foreign companies
- auditing company records to ensure legal compliance
“The company secretarial team at Shoosmiths have always been both reliable and responsive, and have provided us with a very good service.
Corporate & partnership structures
The structure through which a business operates can have a significant effect upon its financial return and ability to react to changing circumstances. We advise on the practical impact of those structures on your business, not just the legal aspects, and consider the type of venture, how funding is provided and how, who has control and potential exit strategies.
Corporate governance & compliance
Corporate governance does not just affect public companies. It is about establishing effective relationships between shareholders and directors, maintaining sound risk management policies while establishing remuneration packages for executive directors that are focused on delivering value to shareholders and ensuring that directors are accountable.
We assist chairmen, boards of directors, company secretaries and in-house lawyers on all aspects of UK corporate governance. This includes providing training, assisting in the wording of corporate governance procedures and policies, the terms of reference for remuneration, nomination on other committees and corporate governance reporting in annual reports.
Recent experience includes:
Delivering briefings to UK finance directors on the current direction of UK and European corporate governance; and
Advising a listed company on difficulties concerning its annual general meeting.
Group & capital restructuring
Our team have extensive experience in the field of group and capital restructuring, who pride themselves on providing an unstuffy, pragmatic and can-do approach to your needs.
We appreciate the importance of working as a team with your accounting and tax advisers and will use our considerable experience in project managing your restructuring to ensure it runs as smoothly, efficiently and cost-effectively as possible and regularly advise on business and asset transfers, capital reductions, debt waivers, demergers and share reorganisations.
Recent experience includes advising Hamleys and Lundbeck on group and capital restructuring.
Joint ventures
The ideal joint venture or PPP creates value beyond the sum of its parts, helping the parties realise commercial returns or drive change and leave long-term legacies that might be impossible to achieve otherwise.
Our dedicated and intensely commercial joint venture structuring team knows what works in certain situations and what is likely to deliver the maximum benefit. Importantly though, we will not just offer you an 'off the shelf' solution. We recognise that our clients' drivers for each joint venture project are unique, so the solution we deliver must be too.
Recent experience includes advising on Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus, a PPP between the Homes and Communities Agency, the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, Halton Borough Council and Langtree Group Plc, one of the UK's leading locations for high-tech business and leading edge science, which was awarded Enterprise Zone status.
