I have returned from a recent trip to Singapore, where our managing director is once again in place at our Singapore office. There is a lot of activity there, and we will be adding extra staff over the next few months. Another recent recruit in Singapore will be running a new company involved in trading foodstuffs and other commodities under the Zetland banner. More details will be provided in a future edition of this newsletter.
A welcome returnee to Zetland in Hong Kong will be taking up the position of director in mid-August. He and his wife have recently had a baby girl, and he is taking some parenting time off prior to re-joining us.
I attended a seminar in Hong Kong organised by the General Chamber of Commerce on the recently signed Hong Kong/Australia Free Trade Agreement, which is featured in the newsletter. While the agreement is a significant achievement (and the government officials were congratulating themselves effusively for merely doing their jobs), I berated them on the lack of a Double Tax Agreement (“DTA”) with Australia. Singapore, which has a broadly similar tax regime to Hong Kong, has had a DTA in place for almost fifty years. Hong Kong has been negotiating now for a decade with no discernible progress having been made. I hope the officials got the message!
