Charles E. ("Skip") Stiver Jr.

has a traditional transactional tax practice involving broad facets of tax law.

Skip has been with Greenberg Traurig since November 1992. He previously practiced tax law in New York City for 17 years, primarily with Davis Polk & Wardwell and also with Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. Skip taught international tax at the University of Miami Law School for 10 years as an adjunct professor. He has an AV rating from Martindale-Hubbell and has been listed in Best Lawyers in America since 2001.

Skip's practice has included wide-ranging work in mergers and acquisitions, including various types of tax-free reorganizations as well as partially and fully taxable acquisitions, tender offers, spin-offs and other transactions. Skip co-authored one of the leading articles on the election to step up the basis of the assets of an acquired corporation in a taxable stock acquisition, and he has written and lectured on the tax considerations raised by acquisitions of high tech companies.

In addition to M&A transactions, Skip has experience with all other facets of general corporate income tax, including net operating loss carryovers, stock distributions, redemptions, liquidations, collapsible corporations and personal holding companies.

Skip's practice also has included extensive experience in the taxation of capital markets transactions. In the context of structured finance, he has acted as issuer's counsel for real estate mortgage investment conduits (REMICs), collateralized mortgage obligations, credit card receivables transactions and factoring transactions. Other capital markets experience includes public distributions and private placements of auction rate preferred stock; foreign currency obligations (foreign currency debt, foreign currency warrants, PERLs and reverse PERLs); synthetic financial instruments, indexed notes, and other derivatives; REITs, regulated investment companies (mutual funds) and unit investment trusts; and Eurobonds. Skip has undertaken the tax planning and structuring of leveraged leases, including international double dip leases.

In the international arena, Skip has experience in numerous in bound and out bound acquisitions, dispositions, investments and restructurings, including a well-publicized transaction, the first corporate inversion in which a U.S. corporation was acquired by its Panamanian subsidiary, which resulted in saving the company tax on $500 million of income annually and in Congress amending the tax code to prevent future transactions of that type. He successfully sued the U.S. Virgin Islands for a refund of V.I. withholding tax collected on a dividend paid by a V.I. corporation to a U.S. taxpayer, resulting in the court invalidating the V.I. withholding tax and in Congress' later amending the law to restore the tax.

Skip represented large money center banks in New York, handling not only their internal tax problems but tax issues for their clients and advising on their domestic and international transactions, including numerous kinds of cross-border financings. The banks had a great interest in the foreign tax credit, and Skip also has written and lectured on that topic.

Skip has worked and taught in the partnership tax context. He developed a format for research and development limited partnerships that, unlike most R&D partnerships, was not challenged successfully by the IRS. He has handled the tax aspects of numerous real estate investments, and he taught partnership tax at Cardozo Law School in New York.

In addition to the litigation against the Virgin Islands, Skip has handled other tax controversy work, including annual tax audits and litigation for a major New York City bank as well as a number of intercompany pricing disputes for both private and public companies, including several for international oil companies, each of which was resolved in the taxpayer's favor.