Andrew Wellsted
Head of Tax, South Africa
Andrew is the National Head of the tax department in South Africa. He is also a member of our specialised exchange control team.
His tax experience covers a broad range of transactions relevant to the practice’s corporate client base, predominantly in the international, banking and M&A fields.
In the banking and financial service industry, Andrew has significant experience in advising various financial institutions on financing transactions including project finance, structured finance and preference shares. He also has experience in product structuring in the financial services sector, including advising on the structuring derivatives and other structured products from a tax perspective.
From a corporate perspective, Andrew has assisted with a number of domestic and international transactions covering both inward and outward investments, group reorganisations, and structuring mergers, acquisitions or disposals.
Andrew has also assisted with a number of commodity financing transactions and has experience in dealing with the taxation of derivatives including single stock futures, contracts for difference and other derivative type contracts or products.
He obtained his Masters Degree (Tax) in 2002 at the University of the Witwatersrand and in 2004 he attained specialised diplomas in Capital Gains tax and Mining Tax law.
Andrew is the author of numerous articles dealing with a range of exchange control and tax issues and he lectures the Capital Gains Tax module for the HDIP and masters in Tax Law course at the University of the Witwatersrand.
The national tax team is comprised of a mixture of experienced and young practitioners who all have a keen focus on finding commercial solutions for clients, while ensuring that the client service is of the highest standard.
From an exchange control perspective, he has many years of experience in advising in this field.
He has successfully:
- Advised clients on appropriate transaction structures which comply with the exchange control regime in place from time-to-time.
- Obtained approval from the financial surveillance department of the Reserve Bank to (Finserv) or an authorised dealer on behalf of clients.
- Assisted with regularising exchange control contraventions by clients, in consultation with Finserv.
His experience in cross-border tax transactions ensures that he is au fait with the most novel structures, and is aware of the exchange control anomalies which arise from time-to-time.
“Andrew Wellsted is ‘practical’, ‘commercial’ and ‘consistently delivers quality tax advice’.” Legal500, 2013.
Selected client work
His recent experience includes:
- Advised Macquarie Security South Africa on implications of a scrip loan transaction.
- Providing the Industrial Development Corporation with an analysis of its preference share funding structures to assist it in ensuring that it achieves its development funding objectives most efficiently.
- Advised Rio Tinto on the restructuring of existing preference share funding arrangement.
- Advised Barclays Bank on the reorganisation of its African subsidiaries in conjunction with Absa.