Lawyer Monthly - November 2021 Edition

Andreas Constantinides Managing Director TMF Group Stadyl Building, 4th Floor, 10-12 Florinis street, Nicosia 1065, Cyprus Tel: +357 22 451 327 www.tmf-group.com Andreas Constantinides is Managing Director of TMF Cyprus. A skilled leader and lawyer, he has been called to the bar in England and Wales and in Cyprus, and bears a track record of success in both financial services and corporate governance. TMF Group is a leading provider of international business administration services. Its Cyprus team includes lawyers admitted as members of the Cyprus Bar Association, ACCA-qualified accountants, and members of the local fiduciary, accountancy and tax bodies. 1 The shareholding requirement does not apply to: companies listed on a recognised stock market; Cypriot companies in shipping, high technology and pharmaceuticals; onshore companies that began life offshore (and were approved by the Cyprus Central Bank); or citizens naturalised according to economic criteria. 64 WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM | NOV 2021 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY - THE CYPRUS IP BOX REGIME: FROM TAX HAVEN TO TAX HUB Technical specialists Employment of technical experts and professionals from third countries is also subject to the €2,000 per month salary minimum, but numbers are limited according to the size of the business, while the skills and professions eligible are restricted to those parts of the economy considered to be a strategic priority. Companies with annual turnover of less than €1 million are limited to five foreign technical specialists. This rises to between 100 and 200 for a company turning over more than €30 million. In between are five intermediate quotas, each determined by turnover. The full list of priority skills does include the marine engineers and naval architects needed by one of Cyprus’s oldest industries, shipping. But more than three-quarters of them are ICT- and pharma-focused roles: engineers specialising in software and systems, telecoms and space, machine learning and DevOps; programmers, developers, and other specialists in applications and data architectures, AI and machine intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, big data, user-experience design, cyber security, mobile computing and applications development; as well as pharmaceutical technologists, engineers, QA experts and IP specialists. The full package Cyprus’s generous, user-friendly IP-taxation regime had already made it an attractive and popular new home for high-tech and IP-rich companies. Now it has the start- up support and third-country recruitment incentives to match. Cyprus’s generous, user- friendly IP-taxation regime had already made it an attractive and popular new home for high-tech and IP-rich companies.