Fred Ward

Fred brings many years of experience to his role as a partner in our Tax team. His practice has a particular focus on corporate finance work, mergers and acquisitions, and structured investment products. Offering both tax advice and litigation services, Fred is a highly regarded tax specialist.

With more than 20 years’ with the partnership, Fred’s work has involved offering clients a broad range of taxation services, including advice on cross-border financing structures, mergers and acquisitions and dealing with the Inland Revenue at all levels of the investigation process, including negotiating settlements.

His experience includes advising:

• Trustpower on its demerger through a court scheme of arrangement which saw the creation of two listed companies. The demerger was structured as a distribution of the demerged entities upon liquidation, and has been implemented without enabling legislation.
• CBA, ASB, ANZ Banking Group and ANZ on Basel III compliant Tier 2 and Additional Tier 1 issues.
• Auckland Transition Agency on its merger of local authorities to form Auckland's 'Super City'.
• Fonterra Co-Operative Group on its Trading Among Farmers project and the establishment of the Fonterra Shareholders' Fund (FSF). The FSF was the first multi-rate PIE to be listed.
• ASB Bank and ANZ Bank New Zealand on the establishment of their covered bond programmes.
• Commonwealth Bank of Australia in relation to the PERLs IX, PERLs VIII and PERLs VI capital raising transactions.

LLB (Hons), BCom, University of Canterbury.
LLM, University of Michigan.

Fred has been a partner with Russell McVeagh since 1995.

He is a member of the International Fiscal Association and is ranked as a leading tax lawyer by Chambers Asia-Pacific, Asialaw Profiles 2018, Legal 500, and as a leading adviser by Tax Controversy Leaders (2017 Edition). He was awarded 2018 Tax Lawyer of the Year – Auckland in Best Lawyers^® 2019 guide.

Fred co-authored the New Zealand Securitisation chapter for the 2018 Chambers and Partners Global Practice Guides publication.