Susan Johnson
Associate
Susan is an associate in the Moore Stephens Private Client Services team, specialising in art and heritage-related capital tax and inheritance tax issues. Susan is a solicitor and Chartered Tax Adviser with more than 20 years’ experience. Originally joining Moore Stephens in 2002, Susan left to join Christie’s Auction House in 2005 where she ran the Heritage & Taxation Advisory Service, before returning to Moore Stephens in 2011.
Susan’s experience includes advising wealthy individuals, and their trustees on international capital taxation issues. She also advised on the building of private museums and tax deferrals on works of art on death. At Christie’s, she advised clients on a wide range of issues in connection with the sale (and sometimes purchase) of works of art, including the sale of £20m-worth of artefacts from the Althorp estate in 2010 by the Spencer family trustees, as well as being instrumental in negotiating the sale to Tate of the Rubens sketch for his ceiling paintings in the Banqueting House in Whitehall in 2008.
Susan is the author of a number of articles on art & tax as well as writing the heritage chapter in Society of Trust & Estate Practitioners Administration of Estates, and Dymonds’ Capital Taxes and as co-author of Tolley’s Taxation of Private Property. She is a member of the Heritage Group of Lawyers, and was part of the working party which assisted HMRC in the preparation of Guidelines for conditional exemption, private treaty sales and offers in lieu of inheritance tax. She was an observer on the Political & Taxation Committee of the Historic Houses Association and contributed to their responses to HMRC consultation on the Budgets of 2006 & 2008 as they affected heritage & the wider arts, the valuation of heritage property under FRS 30 & the Mirlees Report into the future of taxation.
She has been a member of the Chattels Valuation Fiscal Forum and is a former Vice President of the Association of Taxation Technicians.
Services
Taxation - personal
Trusts and estates/fiduciary services
Sectors
Arts, entertainment and media
Private clients and family offices