La Presa Partners LLC · Los Angeles

Tax strategy for investment managers, family offices, and complex transactions.

A quantitative practice for people whose decisions move the number. We connect technical tax analysis to the dollars, timing, and trade-offs that drive the decision, and where the answer turns on economics we pair the advice with a model that makes the consequences clear.

Discuss a matter

Joan Blaeu, Nova et Accuratissima Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula, Amsterdam, 1664 (Library of Congress)

Who is behind the advice

Experience from inside the investment business.

La Presa is led by Carlos A. Schmidt, MBT, MBA, CPA, former Partner and Global Head of Tax at Ares Management, where he built the tax function from three people to more than forty and structured the firm's IPO, its Up-C and tax receivable agreement, and its conversion to a C corporation. Before Ares he was a tax partner at Ernst & Young and at Deloitte's National Tax Office and Tax Director at Highbridge Capital Management. You work directly with the adviser responsible for your analysis.

Full biography

Selected work at La Presa

Trimontium

Tax adviser on a $325 million capital solution for Authentic Restaurant Brands, a Garnett Station Partners portfolio company (September 2026).

Client names appear with permission. Other matters are described without names on the About page.

Who we serve

Three kinds of client. One kind of problem.

Fund sponsors negotiating a continuation vehicle. Family offices deciding how to hold a stake. Individuals with more at risk in a single tax year than most firms see in a decade. Different seats, same question: what does this structure cost after tax, and can someone show me?

We can. We build the model alongside the memo, and the two agree before either leaves the building: basis, liabilities, allocations, rates, timing, and the judgment calls that sit on top of them.

When a matter has six advisers on it, we run the play; we do not replace the team. Counsel, accountants, and bankers keep their roles, the tax analysis and the transaction economics stay aligned, and we bring the creative structure when the obvious one does not work.

Our services

What we do

Structuring, transactions, and the numbers behind them.

Fund & blocker structures

Feeders, parallels, SMAs, and leveraged blockers, with the ECI, withholding, and §163(j) arithmetic run rather than assumed.

Transactions & TRAs

Manager M&A, continuation funds, Up-C IPOs, and tax receivable agreements, with the gain computed before anyone signs.

Models & tax operations

After-tax return comparisons, waterfalls, and basis roll-forwards built to committee standard, and the tax metrics a CFO should watch.

Opinions, family office, renewable energy, and controversy: all seven services

A house rule

A position we cannot model is a position we do not yet understand.

Insights

News & insights

October 2026

UK Budget · Cross-border · LLCs · Sovereign investors · Private capital

The Quiet Parts of the UK Budget

The UK Budget of October 28 saved its lasting changes for the back pages. U.S. LLC members in London get a long-awaited credit, but only for tax “paid by them personally,” which may leave out state PTET and New York City UBT. Sovereign investors will pay UK tax on owning property from 2029 but not on lending against it. Tax on interest and rent now runs 25 points above tax on gains, and a new inheritance tax rule on trust debts is already in force.

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October 2026

Bee law · Legal history · UK tax · Pollination

The Law of the Hive

The most personal thing we have written, and the second note with nothing to do with your K-1. It began with insomnia in 2020 and the English rules of beekeeping, and it runs from Justinian to a seventh-century Irish tract on bee stings, a Nuremberg beekeepers' guild with its own court and crossbows, the straw hives the English burned every autumn, and a disease that emptied Edwardian apiaries and may never have existed, through to this year's fights over pesticides, honey labels, and a hornet from France. Then, because we could not help ourselves, the tax: HMRC zero-rates the hire of honey bees and standard-rates the box they arrive in.

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October 2026

Artificial intelligence · Research credit · Section 174A · Sales tax

The Meter Is Running

Apollo’s Torsten Slok finds no AI payoff yet outside the tech giants, and companies now call token spending a cost center. The tax code already shares that cost: every token is deductible, and tokens spent building new software can earn a research credit, if usage is tagged when it is consumed. We run the numbers on one $10 million model bill and set out four steps for year-end.

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