Family Office

Indian Tycoon Creates Singapore Family Office – Media

Editorial Staff 11 October 2022

Indian Tycoon Creates Singapore Family Office – Media

Singapore has taken steps to encourage family offices to set up in the jurisdiction over recent years, but within certain guidelines.

One of Asia’s richest men, Mukesh Ambani, is creating a family office in Singapore, highlighting how the Asian city-state is making inroads into the family offices space, according to a Bloomberg report.

The chairman of Reliance industries, who is based in Mumbai, has already chosen a manager and location for the office, the report said, citing unnamed sources.

Singapore has been pushing its credentials as a family offices jurisdiction. Already, billionaires such as Google co-founder Sergei Brin, for example, have set up an office there. The jurisdiction did, however, introduce tougher rules on family offices that wanted to enjoy tax-exempt status.

Singapore, as WealthBriefingAsia has noted, has a variable capital company (VCC) regime which has been in place since 2020. VCCs enable branches of a family with different goals to run separate sub-funds but pool their costs. To some extent the development mirrors the structure innovations that have taken place in Jersey, Guernsey, the Cayman Islands and other offshore centres.

Based on estimates from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, there were about 400 single-family offices as at end-2020 and 700 SFOs as at end-2021. MAS does not have estimates on aggregate business spending, aggregate AuM held and the amount invested locally by SFOs, the regulator said in early July this year.

Ambani, who is worth an estimated $83.7 billion according to the Bloomberg Wealth Index, wants the Singapore family office to be running within a year, Bloomberg quoted one person as saying. The report added that Ambani’s wife Nita Ambanlooi is also helping to set it up.

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