Just around the corner from the front door of Totus’s offices, the formerly neglected and sleepy, ’30s-era Farringdon train station is being remade in marble, steel and glass on a soaring scale, as the existing north-south train lines running beneath it are modernised and a new east-west train line is retro-fitted.
New development
Everywhere you look there is evidence of construction. Once completed, the works will mean Totus’s offices will be just minutes by train from all three of London’s major international airports – Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton.
Vince De Stefano, one of Totus’s founders and its managing director, says the Farringdon neighbourhood’s future connectivity is one of its main attractions as a location for the internationally-focused business, though he admits that it also happens to be the neighbourhood in which he was born and grew up. (“I went to school in what is now the Central School of Ballet, on Herbal Hill,” he says, gesturing out the window. “Back then it was St Catherine Laboure.”)
The transformation of Farringdon is also, though, a metaphor for what is happening at Totus.
There may not be any cranes or cement mixers visible in the Totus offices (except, perhaps, through the windows). But it too has undergone some fundamental changes recently, and this is continuing, De Stefano says, as the company, like the train station, moves to accommodate the modern era.
Here though, the modernisation is taking the form of a greater emphasis on tax expertise, the shifting of the company’s centre of operation to London from Gibraltar and Southern Spain, and a plan to expand into such new markets as northern Spain, Germany, Brazil, Hong Kong and India.
Hopkins merger
The changes at Totus began in 2011, when it sold out of its share of a joint venture wealth management operation it had in Gibraltar with the Gib-based law firm of Triay & Triay. Around the same time it merged with Hopkins Consulting, which until this point had been a joint venture partner, and the brains behind the part of Totus’s operations known as Totus Tax.
The Triay & Triay joint venture had begun shortly after De Stefano’s partner – co-founder and current chairman of Totus, Simon Ingram – decided about ten years ago to move permanently to Sotogrande, an up-market resort area in Spain’s Costa del Sol, about 25km east of Gibraltar, where he had a holiday home.
Once there, he met a senior partner at T&T, who, De Stefano says, remains Ingram’s lawyer and a friend, even though the joint venture ended with the sale. “We wanted to take the [Totus] brand global, and they had a different vision.”
Back in London, Hopkins Consulting was founded in 2002 by ex-Ernst & Young senior managers Simon Hopkins and Barton Facey. Hopkins is now Totus’s group finance director and director of advisory services, while Facey is group operations director and director of compliance at Totus Tax.
The arrangement means that Totus is now owned by four partners instead of two, and is formally affiliated, through its merger with Hopkins, with the WTP Advisors tax network, a US-headquartered association that enables its member firms to benefit from the expertise of the other affiliates.
Tax matters
De Stefano, who returned to the UK from Spain recently as part of the moving of Totus’s base of operations, believes tax has become a more important component of the advisory toolkit, particularly if one is looking to accommodate high net worth clients, as Totus does.
“Tax concerns HNWIs because they typically either pay too much, or they don’t pay it at all, and clearly both are issues that need to be sorted,” he says in an interview at the new Totus offices in London.
“I think I have yet to meet one high net worth individual in Spain who is not concerned and … continue on page 2
