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How safe is a nominee?

thalo

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Dec 21, 2019
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Because my anonymity is very important, I wanted to ask questions like, "How safe is your nominee?

I guess in no country is a nominee safe, is he? They would tell on you directly in an investigation?

Is it better to choose your own nominee that you know? What experience do you have?
 
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This question was rised many times before here on the forum. It is totally safe if you find a trusted and reliable law firm that appoint nominees. It is totally unsafe to use if you find some sort of reseller or random firm around and appoint them nominees.

No one here will be able to give you a correct answer since all answers will be correct. The key is to find a law or certified accounting firm that you can trust and look into the eyes, and feel good in your stomach.
 
I think you should consider Nominee risk from a couple of angles to be honest. 1. Is the Nominee safe in terms of disclosure of who they act for and 2. Are they safe in terms of accessing your funds / company etc

1. It is highly unlikely that any Nominee is realistically going to throw themselves under a bus for their client who paid them a few hundred pounds, but you can ensure that Nominees are located in inaccessible parts of the world, make it expensive to approach them and use jurisdictions where they are not forced to submit to laws in other countries and you make life very hard for anyone trying to access them. You can further complicate matters by using a corporate nominee with a physical nominee appointed which means that accessing information in the corporate location needs to occur first followed by trying to access the individuals in their hard to reach location.

2. Many companies use general nominees who offer their services to lots of other companies and are not really known by the incorporation agent. Some, like us have nominees that are only employed by our company, they are staff but exist in hard to reach offshore locations and are considerably more reliable, well known and fully identified individuals, often professionals. All providers of Nominees should be doing regular KYC checks on their nominees to ensure they remain suitable.

In all cases protection documentation should exist such as undated resignation documents, declaration of trust, power of attorney etc and you should at all times have the ability to remove the nominees at will without their consent.

The only issue with accounting and law firms as mentioned above is that they often are too heavily regulated and can relatively easily be forced to share information about their client.

As @Gediminas says, other more complex structures exist to help with privacy.
 
In one of our companies we have had a nominee director and shareholder appointed for at least 10 years by now. Let's say so, it's not a small business and a substantial amount of money is floating through the accounts. Never had a single issue!
 
In one of our companies we have had a nominee director and shareholder appointed for at least 10 years by now. Let's say so, it's not a small business and a substantial amount of money is floating through the accounts. Never had a single issue!
The question is, what happens if you suddenly lose the documents that restrict the nominees power.

Can they potentially sell your business?
 
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The question is, what happens if you suddenly lose the documents that restrict the nominees power.

Can they potentially sell your business?
Documentation designed to protect you and which is created at the time of appointment is very important and should be kept safe. In 99.9% of cases you will not have an issue in the event of lost documents as most Nominees are perfectly sensible, legitimate and professional people with no ulterior motive to sell you business from beneath you. The documents should be kept safe 1. to make your life easier in the future and 2. to protect you from that tiny minority of people who will take advantage of the situation.
 
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