Key takeaways:

• The UK government has published the Finance Bill 2015. As expected, new rules are being introduced with effect from 6 April that seek to tax “disguised investment management fees” to UK income tax rather than under the lower tax rates offered by the capital gains tax regime.
• The first draft of the rules, published at the close of 2014, was riddled with problems and brought the tax treatment of carry and co-investment returns into question as well as having an incredibly broad jurisdictional scope. The categories of exemption are now wider than when they were first proposed and both the co-investment returns and carried interest definitions more closely (although not always exactly) resemble commercial reality.
• The rules could affect any fund which conducts activity (however minor) in the UK and will therefore need to be considered by UK based funds as well as non-UK based funds.