Offshore

A country or territory with special business conditions for foreign companies, such as low or zerotaxes, simple rules of corporate reporting and management, the ability to hide the real business owners.

In this regard, offshore companies are often used for crimes: laundering of criminal money, state corruption, fraudulent transactions. Companies are registered in the country of offshore location, transferring their capital there.

In Russian legislation, offshore companies are called "controlled foreign companies" and their activities are taxed in some cases.There are more than 50 offshore zones in the world.

The first mention of offshore appeared in a newspaper on the east coast of the United States in the late 1950s. It was about a financial organization that escaped government control by geographical selectivity. The company moved the activities that the US government wanted to control and regulate to a territory with a favorable tax climate. The conceptThere are more than 50 offshore zones in the world.

" >offshoreit includes not only a legal concept, but also an economic and geographical one.

Lawyers, without particularly revealing the financial essence of offshore companies, raise secondary topics, for example, that there is no consensus on what can be considered offshore. Offshore schemes were used back in the days of ancient Athens, when a two percent import and export tax was introduced. In order to avoid paying taxes, Greek and Phoenician merchants began to circumnavigate the territory of Athens for twenty miles. Soon, nearby small islands began to act as tax havens, where contraband goods were imported without paying duties and taxes.

In the XV century, there were very low trade restrictions and taxes in Flanders, because of this, it was more profitable for English merchants to carry and sell wool in Flanders, rather than in England, where taxes and restrictions were much higher.

In the USA, the offshore history of tax evasion began in the XVIII century, in order to evade the import tax imposed by England, merchants tried to carry out their trade activities through Latin America. Switzerland has become the prototype of the modern jurisdiction of offshore zones. Against the background of attracting financial business to the economy, money exchange centers were created in Switzerland, financial secrecy institutions were developed, which became a haven for foreign capital (a law was passed that required bankers to keep records of their clients' accounts, but forbade them to disclose this account to anyone).

In the 1970s, a number of island colonies of Great Britain gained independence, and some remaining as part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland were deprived of financial subsidies from the British budget and switched to the independent formation of their budget through the registration of offshore companies.

Russian companies started using offshore companies in 1991, when the office of the Swiss firm Riggs Walmet Group opened in Moscow, which provided services for the opening and maintenance of companies in tax-free jurisdictions.