The whistle blower turned over more than 11.5 million documents which originated from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. This leak would start what would be known as the Panama Papers Mossack Fonseca alone had 500 employees and more than 40 establishments across the globe that offer a legal structure benefitting from a yearly fee but sometimes companies decide to settle permanently and bring along jobs and know-how as well Panama’s economy. For example, it rose 4 percent per year, one of the highest rates worldwide; some of it is attributed to the liberal tax policies and the establishment of international banking companies.

On the other hand benefit from no taxation less regulations and paperwork since the most tax havens comped among each other and they refuse to enforce stricter rules and fear of an exodus. It is estimated that 32 trillion dollars has been parked in offshore havens and the majority of it untaxed but how exactly do I start an offshore company to start.

One you have to engage into our consultation session and decide your favorite country, our law firm will do the rest after 2 to 7 days. You will be receiving a confirmation and a bank account service charge for the first registration. You now own a company and you can start to invoice your clients or yourself.

Let us explain one possible way to save taxes as you imagine the following scenario: you run a successful construction company in Europe and now you want to expand overseas. You get in touch with local well-connected consultants that know the right people, both parties signed contracts and the money flows but here comes the twist you never intended to expand your business. In fact the consulting companies belong to you unofficially and their only purpose was to send you a bill. Now you take the bill, write it off from your tax declaration and the money’s gone.

This is just one possibility there are definitely more complex constructions, just see Amazon, Starbucks or IKEA due to the discretion it became inevitable that criminals and corrupt officials used those opportunities to put money aside the authoritarian president Iliev and his family from the oil-rich Azerbaijan owned 500 million dollars.

They obtained the money amongst other things by granting mining leases to their own offshore companies. John Braden Kampf was a close friend of Robert Mugabe, the former dictator of Zimbabwe; he is being accused of supplying arms during Zimbabwe intervention in Congo in 1998. Mossack Fonseca terminated his accounts in 2009 and according to the Guardian he has a net worth of over 700 million dollars.

Rafael Caro Quintero was one of Mexico’s most wanted drug lords in 1985 who was sentenced to 40 years in prison and was released in 2013 during his time behind bars. His wealth was managed by the infamous law firm in an email Juergen Mossack himself wrote Pablo Escobar is compared to him and when he leaves the jail.

The protection of assets is not only interesting for rich people but also for owners of small and medium-sized businesses and some countries charge more than 50% of the income. Unfortunately a lot of them fail to deliver and file for bankruptcy not at least due to the enormous burdens.

On the other hand an organization dedicated to fight poverty released this statement about tax havens on their website that we live in a world of plenty but wealthy individuals and the international corporations are robbing billions of dollars in taxes from countries including very poor ones every single year poor countries lose 170 Billion Dollars while 400 million people don’t even have access to basic health care due to tax dodging. This is not possible while government’s keep open tax loopholes for the few leaving little money to spend on quality public services for the many in the aftermath of the Panama Papers Mossack Fonseca ceased their operations in 2018 due to the irreversible damage to their image. Mossack Fonseca had 14,000 clients and helped with the founding of more than 200,000 companies worldwide and they are just one of the top law firms of this kind.

A lot of people don’t like the idea that you have an option that you can benefit from government competition of where you want to set up your business. They think that’s shopping for a place that charges lower tax and lets you grow your business faster is not a good idea but there actually are a lot of reasons besides the legal tax reduction that people do set up foreign companies.

1. Asset Protection:
One of the biggest reasons that people use foreign companies as they want to protect their assets. Obviously there’s a legal way to do this and that’s the way you want to do it but especially in Pakistan where litigation is rampant. If you’re in a product selling business or if you have some kind of high liability putting a distance between yourself and frivolous lawsuits, can be a benefit even if you’re not saving on tax. So if you live in the U.S, you have a business there, there might be a value in having a company in a jurisdiction where lawyers don’t work on contingency and someone has to hire a lawyer. There may be a benefit in you know setting up where someone has to pay a bond if they want to sue you or just in putting distance to where people are gonna say that sounds like too much work.
The laws of the country where your company are based are the laws that establish how your money is protected so if you live in the Pakistan and you’re afraid of lawsuits moving you business overseas can make it harder for people to sue you there are higher requirements for litigation and how about that nobody can just come in and grab your money if it’s sitting in Nevis or in Singapore. It puts up an extra wall for people who want to come and grab your money.

2. Buying Real Estate:
There are some countries that don’t care if they let you buy real estate in any corporate structure. A Hong Kong company, to buy property elsewhere in Asia but a lot of countries really do want you to use their local corporate structure even if it’s a subsidiary to buy real estate. They want you to actually incorporate a local company and that may have some tax benefits for acquiring local property. There were times for example in Montenegro when you could save on v80 and the government sanctioned that but you needed to have a Montenegrin company in order to do so.

3. An Active Business:
If you’re running a business in another country and there’s a couple ways you could go with this. For example, if you go to Georgia and you want to start a business that sells products then you need a local company if you’re a US citizen or if you’re a tax resident in another country. A lot of people go to other countries and start businesses and they set up companies to do so but let’s say you’re even running a business in the Pakistan and you have customers in the UK that want to pay you in a UK Company in British pounds then you might have a company in the UK designed just to collect that money from them and then have an agreement of how that money flows between your two companies. So that’s an offshore company which can help your onshore company.

4. Tax Reduction:
People want to save money in taxes as there’s a myth that you can simply live in your home country where you’d pay high tax it merely move your business overseas to an offshore company and pay no tax, that’s not true, but when structured properly you can cut your tax rates dramatically in some cases cut them to zero and in other cases you can improve the tax deductibility. In other words you can take more expenses as tax deductions in a company like in Hong Kong than you would in a company where you live. It’s not to make things a lot easier as well; it can also be easier for US citizens who live overseas and who can save money on taxes. In fact the average US citizen who makes a hundred thousand dollars a year at an offshore company can save fifteen thousand dollars very easily just by incorporating offshore.

5. To Make An Investment:
This could be property and it could also be that there are certain investments that are only available to certain types of companies. A lot of people use Cayman Islands companies as investment vehicles because they don’t want to incorporate in the US. So even if you’re a US citizen there may be certain investments that are off-limits to you but you can go as a US citizen instead of a foreign company and make the overseas investments through that vehicle so if you’re tired of being pigeon-holed into lower yield lower return investments that everyone else is doing and you want to explore some of the investments that the rest of the world has to offer. You may need to set up an offshore vehicle in order to avail yourself and there are other investments where like mutual funds in other countries you can go and set up an offshore bank account and you can access through them in order to legally bypass some of the restrictions on foreign holdings in your country.

Now all these benefits are in addition to the tax benefits an active business can put themselves into place with by simply setting up a company in another country. There are legal tax benefits for many people. There’s a right way to do it and there’s a wrong way to do it.