Peter Surtees
Director
Peter Surtees specialises in corporate tax, wills, estate planning and trusts, and VAT and is based in the Cape Town office.
His activities cover the full range of income tax and value-added tax dealt with by the Group and he has a special interest in personal estate planning.
He regularly assists each division of the corporate law group in the Cape Town office, and in particular the banking and finance and mergers and acquisitions teams. He also advises on exchange control issues.
Peter obtained his BCom from Rhodes University in 1961 and qualified as a Chartered Accountant (SA) in 1965. He obtained the MCom in Taxation from Rhodes in 1985. Peter was a partner in a firm of chartered accountants until joining the staff of the Department of Accounting at Rhodes University in 1980, where he rose to the position of Head of Department. He took early retirement and moved to Cape Town at the end of 1997, where he was appointed to the newly formed tax division of the Group’s Cape Town office.
He was awarded a Certificate of Commendation for “outstanding contributions to accounting education” at a University of Natal graduation ceremony held in Cape Town in June 1999. The award recognises his contributions over two decades at Rhodes University, as well as his present teaching at UCT.
He is a member of the editorial panel of Integritax, the highly regarded tax publication of the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants. He writes widely on tax-related topics nationally and internationally and presents the MCom (Taxation) course at UCT. Since 2007 he has been a member of the Tax Court; this is a State President’s appointment.