For anyone faced with the prospect of going offshore, their reasons are all very personal and are something that should not be assigned to mass production. If anything ever did require a tailor made solution, it is this. Frankly stated you would not automatically want to hand over the structuring of your offshore set-up account to a company that appears at the top of a search engine. These companies are widely regarded as ‘corporation mills’. They have a clever marketing strategy but have little regard for their client’s privacy concerns and individual financial well being.

It is simple to see how your confidential financial matters will come under much more scrutiny than necessary if you decide to become a customer of a company known to sell offshore banking solutions to any person with a wallet. Should some of that company’s less than honorable clients start to experience a hot collar (which let’s face it, is more than likely to happen if the company opens their door to any yahoo) then their problems will cast an unappreciated spotlight on your affairs.

Here’s another practical example I can recall of another classic issue which emanates from mass offshore production assets protection. In a far off land there used to be a Private European Bank. This bank had in their employ a charismatic man whose sole purpose was to appear at seminars where he talked to many wealthy people. He would pitch the bank’s products, such as annuities, offshore bank accounts and other tax favorable products on offer from the bank.

The bank had invested in a fancy website, where all their tax advantages were clearly laid out and wonderfully explained. As an example, if you were to put 100,000 Euros into an annuity, it would earn 4% interest. In other words you will earn 5000 Euros per year as a completely tax free return on your capital until eventually the 100,000 Euros was paid back in full. This sounds marvelous, but by the time the 20 years is over you might have died! However, after your death your heirs would inherit the 100,000 Euro death benefit – also tax free of course.

This was a convenient way to move assets offshore, where they were protected against judgments and you could kill 2 birds with 1 stone, earning an easy 100,000 Euros tax free. Now personally I think products such as the one described above was intermediately legal once upon a time. Due to heavy publicizing of these rules, the entire landscape has changed. This easy money making business was brought to a sudden death – simply because the authorities identified the exploitation and soon closed the loophole for annuities.