Ive seen “The Firm”. Aren offshores all about tax evasion and money laundering?
This is a fallacy perpetuated by Hollywood fiction which the offshore centres have worked hard to dispel. The truth is that increased scrutiny from international bodies, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has resulted in a string of measures designed to extinguish the potential for criminal abuse of offshore financial systems. The result is a compliance environment which is considerably more onerous than most onshore financial centres. You’ll experience this first hand when you try to open a bank account and are asked to provide an unusually long list of due diligence documentation. A prime example of this fallacy is frequent Hollywood references to “numbered bank accounts in the Cayman Islands” which were in fact outlawed many years ago.
