Transferwise Business Account tax implacations for non-UK resident with a UK registered private limited company

Business
,
1

I’m hoping someone can assist me with the following query I have.

My partner has a British and South African passport. He was born in South Africa, and received his British passport through his mother who is British. He lived in the UK for max a year approx. 10 years ago. He is a non-UK resident. I have the Dutch nationality, but we are both living and working in Zambia with our Zambian registered company. Our plan is to register a (dormant) private limited company in the UK under the same name as our company in Zambia. This way we can open a Transferwise borderless business account (we cant’t open one from Zambia) with our UK registered business. It is unclear to me if we can be a (dormant) company in the UK with a Transferwise business account receiving money from our international clients, and what the tax implications would be? We pay tax in Zambia on money that comes directly into our local Zambian USD bank account. We are tax payers in Zambia, do we have to declare the money that comes in to our UK Transferwise business account and pay tax in the UK as well? This money would leave the account immediately as we would be paying our service providers (the safari lodges) which our clients have booked, the remainder of the money in that account will be transferred to our Personal Transferwise accounts or to our Zambian USD account for tax purposes. We don’t want to do anything illegal, we just want to know how it works when you register a company in a country you aren’t a resident and then open a Transferwise business account under that companies’ name.
Thanking you in advance and looking forward to hearing from you.

2

This has nothing to do with transferwise (except that they won’t like if you use the account on behalf of another business), your main issue is that the UK company will not be dormant.

You can run it as a separate UK limited company, either acting as an agent or reseller for the other company. You should charge on arm’s length principle. The UK company’s profits are chargeable to tax in the UK, unless the company is tax resident in Zambia under a tax treaty.

Your personal residence doesn’t matter except that it can make the UK company tax resident also where you live, in addition to the UK.
You should check out how Zambia will consider the UK company.

3

Are you sure you want a UK company? If you register a UK Limited Liability Partnership rather than a company to act as your UK payment agent you might find that the LLP has many of the advantages of a UK company when dealing with UK banks, while being relatively transparent for UK tax compliance. If you must have a company maybe consider also a Gibraltar company - Gibraltar has a more business friendly tax regime than the UK and will only tax Gibraltar source profits.

1 Like