Miffed Over Tax, Firm to Desert Beverly Hills : Business: An aircraft-leasing company announces it will move a few blocks away to Los Angeles, where its business tax would be much less.

After months of unsuccessful negotiations with the city of Beverly Hills over its business-license tax bill, one of the world’s largest aircraft-leasing companies announced this week that it will leave its home of 15 years and relocate a few blocks away in Los Angeles.

“We owe it to our shareholders to move if the tax code makes staying here much more expensive,” said Lou Gonda, executive vice president of International Lease Finance Corp.

Gonda’s company, which got a modest start in Beverly Hills in 1973, generated more than $200 million in revenues in 1988 by leasing large commercial aircraft to airlines.

Said Gonda: “We lease all over the world. We just happened to have our office in the city of Beverly Hills, but it could be in Fiji. They (Beverly Hills) want to put us in the (tax) classification of a car-leasing company that has a showroom on Wilshire Boulevard.”

The firm’s attorney, Barbara Brown, said the vast majority of the firm’s planes don’t even fly in the United States, and that state law prohibits cities from taxing corporations on revenues that come from outside their jurisdiction.

City Council members said they were loath to create a precedent by amending the tax code, but they acknowledged that the nature of the firm’s business was unique in the city. They instructed Finance Director Donald J. Oblander and City Atty. Greg Stepanicich to study whether accommodations could be made. Ultimately, they authorized a compromise.

According to Oblander, Beverly Hills originally estimated the firm’s 1990 tax liability, under the current code, at $400,000, based on gross receipts. When the City Council later considered a revision of the municipal code, the revised tax estimate was less than $150,000. But the corporation said it would be willing to pay no more than $88,000, said Oblander, the amount it calculated it would owe under Los Angeles tax codes.

When Stepanicich reported to the council Tuesday afternoon that the company had rejected the compromise proposal, Mayor Max Salter said, “If it’s not worth it to these people to be in this city--where police response time is three minutes, where we have well-taken-care-of trees and beautiful sidewalks--they should seriously restudy their position.”

The other Council members concurred that no further compromise would be sought.

Notified by The Times of the Council’s reaction, Gonda said, “Who cares? The city of Beverly Hills is attractive and so on. All the principals of the company are longtime residents of Beverly Hills. But when you look out (the office window), you see the exact same thing that you see from a block and a half away in Los Angeles. In fact, you see less here, because of the (building) height restriction. We can’t justify staying here to our stockholders, because of fast fire trucks and pretty trees.”

He said the firm had looked into leasing a 23rd-floor office at 6500 Wilshire Blvd. and a 37th-floor office in Century City, both with superior views. Its current headquarters is in the Great Western building at Wilshire and La Cienega boulevards.