I don't have a solution or setup suggestion, but I'm curious if anyone has ideas for what a possible setup could look like.
From all we know here from OCT, solving this is becoming an impossible task. Particularly with the banks, the state can just freeze accounts whenever they want.
First of all, like almost anything, that only works on a preventive basis and not when a case is ongoing (bankruptcy process, legal issues,etc..)
in my opinion, on the legal side, there is today nothing better than a cross-border protective asset Trust in the Cook Island jurisdiction mixed with à St-Kitt operational company.
the legal part is really important, especially the "impossibility to act" scenario.
here is a small summary:
1) set up a protective asset Trust in Cook Islands, which will owns 100% of a LLC in St-Kitt Nevis.
2) you are the sole director of the LLC and you put all your asset in it. so basically you keep full control of your assets.
3) in the scenario a legal case is opened against you, activate the "Impossibility to act" (there is another name for it, I forgot sorry) article so your trustee (the one of the Trust which owns 100% of your LLC) will automatically replace you as director. he has to be a lawyer. The trustee has to respect the law of Cook Island and St-Kitt which basically are as following:
- Statute of limitation of 1 to 2 years depending of the case
- Cook Islands Does not recognize any foreign court order so a new case has to be open locally (see above)
- Does not recognize foreign court order
- very friendly debtor-law (in case statute of limitation cannot be invoked)
- Can owns any kind of assets anywhere in the world
- Trust Deed is not recorded in the public records
- even if the settlor or beneficiary declares bankruptcy the asset are fully protected
- The only way to breach all of that is for the plaintiff to prove you did this structure only to avoid to pay him or hide your assets from him (this is why it is important to do it in a preventive way and not last minute), but.. as it is part of NZ, Trust has other benefits such as estate planning and international diversification, which one can give as reasons for establishing the trust in order to avert creditor claims.
- list is non exhaustive
anyway you have of course to be smart about it and not rush. it would be stupid for an american to do this type of structure and open the corporate bank accounts in the US for example. like any legal structure, you will spend less time and money to set it up right from day one than correcting your mistakes later on.
