Did you know, if you pay tax to the Inland Revenue and later find yourself to have overpaid, that you are not entitled to interest on refund?

The case of Weson Investment Ltd. v Commissioner of Inland Revenue makes this clear. Read on…

Nowadays, it is popular for people domiciled in Hong Kong to have assets both in HK and in the PRC, for example, land and shares. So what happens when the testator dies and the personal representatives / administrators / executors obtain probate in Hong Kong?

The jurisdiction of the Hong Kong Probate Court is only territorial (P. Smart, The Problem of Foreign Assets), therefore an HK grant has no effect abroad unless reciprocal arrangements are in place. The HK grant will have to be registered by the foreign court or probate will have to be obtained therefrom. The main problem, however, is that the PRC does not recognise ‘executorship’ or the ‘third party middleman’ between the testator and the beneficiaries. The PRC generally will only directly distribute the estate according to the will directly to the beneficiaries. Therein lies a more serious problem, i.e. if the beneficiaries are in HK and are fighting amongst themselves, they are unlikely to cooperate and go to the Chinese Probate Court altogether (as is required) for distribution. Therefore, many PRC estates lie untouched and up for grabs as the beneficiaries squabble amongst themselves.

What might the solution be?

…wealth cannot offer an answer to all the problems in life, particularly in the wake of the final rest that every human being has to face eventually. Rather, wealth may bring about a problem as to how one should deal with it after one’s death.

The services by way of hole-digging exercises did not bring about the cure.

In line with Google’s drop of support for Internet Explorer 6, the website development arm of Raven Talon Studios will no longer provide support to the Internet Explorer 6 browser. There will be a 20 day grace period for IE6 users to upgrade to IE7+ or better browsers such as webkit and gecko-based browsers.

At 1pm today, we went through our digital archives to retrieve a rare moment in history, when news coverage of Haiti exceeded that of coverage in USA and Iraq. Here it is:

We live in a city where antitrust laws have done their utmost to the public good. Our cellphone plans are cheap, our food is quite cheap, our trains are on time and air conditioned, our airport is world-class… and the list goes on. Meanwhile, lets take a look at the stone-age cell phone plans in the USA!

In a recent controversial move, the University of Hong Kong published plans to offer members of the public “preliminary legal advice” and to “promote pro bono culture”. Critics say that this move will usurp the function of the struggling junior bar as well as high street solicitors whose function is precisely low-cost preliminary involvement in legal matters. Critics are concerned that with the massive number of PCLL graduates diluting the elite pool of lawyers at the junior end as well as with the recent Civil Justice Reforms implemented in April 2009, the junior end of the bar is struggling to make ends meet. It appears that the University is aggressively positioning itself to initiate a price war that it, being funded by public funds, will surely win.

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It appears that the more you are taxed, the lower your quality of life. Or more accurately, the fewer Macs you can afford, the worse off you are.