Family Office
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.