A friend of chicken licken, as the saying goes. These folk lie awake at night fantasising about Tolley’s Tax Handbook, and worry that excise might be retrospectively levied on equity trades in India and that the IRS might recharacterise equity swaps as disguised cash transactions. Either of these things might happen, of course, just like the sky might fall in on our heads.
Now as you all know the Jolly Contrarian doesn’t like to generalise, but — okay, okay, the JCloves to generalise, I admit it — but, tax lawyers really are, uniformly, and consistently, a bit weird. But weird in a good way. They are weird so we don’t have to be. They’re weird in the same way ninjas[1] are a bit weird — that any people who have devoted their lives to the selfless pursuit of any kind of esoteric knowledge are a bit weird. It takes a weird sort of personality to devote your life to imputation credits and so on, after all.