Mr. Gu Wenjun, as the deputy director of Family Law and Family Wealth Management Practice Committee and the head of Family Wealth and Inheritance Legal Research Center of Nanjing Office, is deeply involved in the field of wealth management, committed to providing family enterprise value management and wealth management legal services for Chinese family enterprises, and has extensive research and practical experience in the top-level structure design of family enterprises, comprehensive compliance and crisis resolution, overall improvement and value management of family strength, design and operation of family office construction at home and abroad, litigation and dispute resolution.
In addition, Mr. Gu Wenjun has been practicing for nearly 20 years, during which he assisted clients in dealing with various difficult problems encountered in the field of Real estate and construction, and handled a number of major, difficult and complex cases. He has extensive research and practical experience in the fields of litigation and dispute resolution.
Achievements
◇ Private Client/Wealth Management
Mr. Gu Wenjun leads the team to provide top-level design and single design of wealth management for a range of families, business owners, entrepreneurs, family businesses, etc., and provide industry-oriented and customized services for customers' wealth protection and intergenerational inheritance. He also advises private bankers, wealth managers and advisers, in the mainland China and overseas. What’s more, he is also good at formulating a two-way separation plan between assets and debts between individuals and companies, between families and companies, between partners and between assets through multi-level equity structures, etc., effectively avoiding the unlimited spread of debt and controlling commercial risks within a certain range.
The aim of his service is ensuring clients achieve their objectives in managing, growing and protecting their wealth for the future. This often involves dealing with complex multi-jurisdictional asset allocations. He forms longstanding relationships with his clients advising across all aspects of private client legislation and wealth management, becoming trusted advisers for future generations.
He leads a team of private wealth lawyers bringing in experts from across the firm and international contacts to achieve all of private clients' personal and business aims, providing the best team for each client’s needs.
Project Features He has been responsible for a number of private wealth management projects. These projects have the following characteristics:
1）It involves a variety of industry sectors, including investment, real estate, electricity, energy and environmental protection, commodities, home appliances, traditional media, property, sports, cultural industries, etc
2）Underlying assets and transactions span multiple geographies / jurisdictions, including Beijing, Shanghai, Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong, USA, Canada, UK, Cayman Islands etc.
3）Provision of legal services across multiple disciplines, including global wealth planning; dispute resolution and litigation; private wealth matters, international wealth structuring; Corporate; mergers & acquisitions; equity restructuring; Family and divorce issues; Contentious estates; Trust planning; Finance and funding issues; Immigration; Real estate and construction for individuals and investment for Chinese and international investors; Capital Markets; Tax law advice; g Wills, probate, China and cross border estate planning; Intellectual Property.
Cases
● Case 1: Family wealth management and inheritance project of a large family client in South China
During 2021, Mr. Gu set up a team of experts to plan the inheritance of global family wealth of more than 10 billion yuan for a large family enterprise client in South China and implement it.
He provides professional, customized and diversified wealth control, preservation, and inheritance plans for client families, including designing top-level equity structures, resolving historical issues, issuing risk isolation and debt planning plans, setting up family offices, completing wills and other forms of succession planning, and being entrusted with long-term as estate administrator.
In the course of the project, he comprehensively used financial, legal and tax tools to build a family wealth management system, especially the use of legal tools (such as equity structure design, wills, prenuptial and postnuptial agreements, etc.) in the wealth management system framework role, while cooperating with other tools (such as insurance, trust, funds, etc.) to maximize the balance of risk and return. Finally, we assisted the client to promote the implementation of the wealth management inheritance plan.
● Case 2: Nationality and tax status selection and wealth inheritance project of a client in Beijing
Jurisdictions involved: United States, Hong Kong, Mainland China. The main work content of the project:
✔ Carry out detailed and comprehensive research, classification and statistics on the global distribution of customers' property situation, not only investigate the famous assets, but also investigate and clarify the assets held on behalf of the client, clarify the status of the customer's family property, and preliminarily check the risk of family wealth;
✔ Conduct a comprehensive understanding and investigation of the information of family members distributed around the world, including but not limited to the gender, age, marriage, national status, place of residence, tax payment status, etc. of partners and children;
✔ Assist clients in hiring foreign lawyers to conduct abandonment tax assessment analysis and nationality assessment;
✔ Coordinate the overall project management process with US tax lawyers, Hong Kong tax lawyers, overseas trust companies, overseas banks, etc.;
✔ Based on the client's real needs and true intentions, comprehensively combine the client's actual property situation and the tax analysis results issued by foreign lawyers, plan, design and build a family wealth management structure for the client, and design and prepare for the management team structure of the family office.
◇ Real estate and construction projects
Mr. Gu has extensive experience in the field of real estate and construction, especially in negotiating and communicating with government departments. In his professional career, he has assisted in handling various difficult issues encountered in the traditional real estate development projects, such as land development, construction projects management, sale and leasing of commercial properties, property management and operation, guarantees and mortgages, foreign investment, etc.
Classic case
● Gu’s team has assisted a real estate company in Guangzhou to solve a number of complex legal problems such as many owners’ defaulting on the balance of housing transactions, confirming the rights of housing property, and the obstruction of housing property rights certifications. They conducted comprehensive researches, sorting and classification of the specific situation of each owner's dispute, help the clients find the crux of the remaining problems, treat them separately, and make risk assessment opinions and formulate corresponding solutions, in order to assist the client to get the balance in a non-litigation way, and at the same time formulate a plan timely to exempt the customer from liability in multiple lawsuits, so as to promote the implementation step by step, effectively solve the problems in advance and settle the lawsuits.
● Gu’s team has assisted a property management company to deal with the nearly 100 cases that the rights to the properties and the lease relationship were not clear by doing some statistical analysis and research, and then according to the information obtained, assess the relevant legal risks, formulate risk isolation plans, guide the company to manage this part of the property in a way that is consistent with its own risk management strategy and structures, and effectively reduce the legal risks in the management and operation.
● Reviewing, for the Project owner, the engineering design contract of suzhou Xingguo Temple, a historical building in Suzhou, the target project.
● Assisting a Shanghai company successfully close a deal with the lessee on a land in Minhang District, Shanghai, after many consultations and negotiations
● Assisting a real estate development company in Panyu, Guangzhou, to conduct many consultations and negotiations with the local government on the replacement of the land of 106707 square meters in Guangzhou.
● Assisting a well-known kitchen appliance company in negotiation with the local government and a leading real estate company on the land of about 80,000 square meters.
◇ Dispute resolution
Mr. Gu Wenjun has provided legal counsel services for the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, listed companies, group companies, investment group companies, large manufacturing enterprises, large construction engineering companies, and financial institutions in Beijing, South China, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai and other places. He represented hundreds of cases in courts at all levels, including the Supreme People's Court, and various arbitration institutions nationwide. The amount involved in the cases he represented exceeded 2.7 billion yuan in total.
In recent years he acted for:
✔ A guangdong listed company in a contract dispute with two other listed groups in Zhejiang (the amount involved in the case exceeded 400 million yuan);
✔ A large group company in Guangdong against a listed company in Foshan in a contract dispute case (the amount involved in the case exceeded 400 million yuan);
✔ A large environmental protection company in Jiangsu against a cement company in Yunnan (the amount involved in the case exceeded 37 million yuan);
✔ A state-owned enterprise in Jiangsu against a steel group in western Shaanxi in a construction project case (the amount involved in the case exceeded 60 million yuan);
✔ A famous electrical appliance manufacturing enterprise in Foshan in a major intellectual property dispute case (the amount involved in the case exceeded 20 million yuan);
✔ A group company in South China in a dispute over a cooperation agreement with a state-owned real estate company (the amount involved in the case exceeded 700 million yuan);
✔ A construction company in Jiangsu against a power plant construction project contract dispute in Yunnan (the amount involved in the case exceeded 50 million);
✔ A Group Company in Guangzhou against a commercial bank in Shanghai in an investment agreement dispute (the amount involved in the case exceeded 300 million);
✔ A dispute over a sales contract between a large trading company in Zhejiang and a trading company in Shanghai (the amount involved in the case exceeded 200 million);
✔ the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of a province in East China in the disposal of major undesirable assets.
Education
Law School of Nanjing Normal University
Professional Experience
2018.11-present Guantao Law Firm Senior Partner/ Deputy Director
of The Business Committee of
Nanjing office
2009.12-2014.2 Beijing Dehe Heng (Nanjing) Law Firm Senior Partner
2003.11-2009.12 Jiangsu Danfeng Law Firm Senior Partner