How to Find an Offshore Provider

PanamaLegal · #1 09-05-2008, 05:10 PM

The following is based on the experiences passed on to us by numerous clients over time. We are a Panama law firm.

An offshore provider by definition can be a Law Firm or individual lawyer, corporate agent, stock broker, Forex Trading Program, bank, or other financial depository.

Location - Make sure you can find a physical location for the offshore provider. People that do not list their street address is a bad sign to us. Why do they not list their street address. Do they not want their disgruntled clients to be able to find them and/or sue them? Are they really not in the country they say they are in? If a person holds a professional license their street address will be listed. Verify their address. It is always best to visit the provider in person. Go to their offices. Make sure they are real. If it is a bank walk in and check things out. Meet the manager. Ask questions.

Licenses - Try very hard to only deal with people holding a professional license of some sort. This will make verification of them and their credentials easier. Be careful of jurisdictions with sordid reputations. One from recent years is Grenada, although they have had an administration change recently. They had banks on down the line scamming people and running away with their money, in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars. The odds of getting burned when dealing with a licensed bank or licensed law firm are greatly diminished as long as you are dealing in a responsible country.

Privacy - Licensed banks, and lawyers can provide protections to you that you will not get from others that are not licensed. Bank secrecy applies only to licensed banks. When you do your formation with a lawyer, attorney client privilege enters into the equation. When you deal with a non-attorney they cannot hide behind attorney client privilege when there is a request for records in a civil matter. They would need to hire an attorney to defend you and your privacy. This will cost them thousands of dollars. Do you think you are worth it to the corporate agent or will he just let the other side come over and photocopy the records? An attorney would defend your right to privacy by himself thus costing the other side a small fortune in legal fees and they would most likely lose, if the attorney is minimally effective and you were in a good jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is always important.

Let me illustrate this sort of scenario: Lets say there is a civil matter in your home country. Lets say the financial enemy of yours has subpoenaed your bank records in the home country which is often extremely easy to do. The other sides lawyer see wire transfers to an offshore bank account. Now to get at you he needs to show the offshore jurisdiction courts more than just a wire transfer from your home country bank account to the offshore corporate bank account. By itself it does not establish any ownership of the bank account or corporation. I am assuming the person under attack had the forethought to use a bearer share corporation that is anonymous in that the names of the owners are not know to the government and do not appear in any public registry or database which is the case with a Panama Corporation (S.A.) and the Panama Foundation is also anonymous. So the lawyer representing your financial enemy now goes to a lawyer in the jurisdiction where the offshore corporation is registered and hires them to get the records. If the entity that sold you the corporation is not a law firm they will have to hire a lawyer to defend your privacy. The other option is to just write you off as a client and let the other side come and copy their records. Then the other side could show ownership of the corporation. The records may also show that the corporate agent assisted in the opening of the bank account and where the bank account is as well as other bank accounts that were previously unknown to the other side. Then they can start a court case against the bank account(s) funds for fraudulent conveyance or any other trumped up case and that is trouble for you that could be avoided if you used a law firm to set up your asset protection structure. A law firm can collect legal fees from frivilous efforts of the other side to break corporate secrecy or attorney client privilege so you may not even have a legal bill to defend your privacy, or you may be able to recover your legal bill outlay.

Non- Bank Financial Depositories - We tell our clients to run from these structures. They rarely if ever operate at all and if so only for a brief period of time. The FATF is the financial Action Task Force. it is a civil organization that sets rules and guidelines for banks that all the banks follow around the world. It is against their rules to have a bank within a bank. All banks must be brick and mortar. So one of these hybrid financial depository structures (New Zealand ones, Swedish credit Unions, etc) do not work in that they break the rules. They accept deposits from customers like a bank, they allow payments ie: they are a bank. This brings to mind the old legal saying - If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck but you call it a dog, it is still a duck. These pseudo financial institutions are little more than bank accounts inside of a real bank waiting to be shut down by the regulators of the country the bank is in, the bank itself or the correspondent banks complaints causing the closure of the account. If these financial entities worked in place of a legitimate licensed banks you would see them all over the net and many people would own them. If it is too good to be, it is not true.

Bottom Line - Pay a personal visit to any offshore entity you are entrusting your hard earned money to. Validate their licenses and legitimacy. Seeing a nice set of law offices and a big bank with the banks name on the building they are in makes for a good nights sleep. Trying to recover assets from offshore operators who cannot be located or found is usually hopeless. I would apply this rule to any virtual currency service as well. If you want a corporation from Country A, use a lawyer in that country, not a corporate agent there or even worse in another country. The corporate agent who has your ID and knows where your bank is, becomes the weakest link in the structure and smart lawyer know how to exploit this.

Hope this helps save people from making mistakes in their offshore structures and asset protection.

OffshorePrivacy · #2 09-06-2008, 04:34 PM

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MoneyOfDoom · #3 09-07-2008, 10:57 PM

You two guys get along juuuuuust fine