Home | Finance | Taxes
Choosing an offshore jurisdiction in today's offshore banking world can be difficult. Often the choice comes down to Switzerland and Panama when you are looking for a place to protect your assets. Switzerland is the established, well respected jurisdiction, while Panama is the up and coming jurisdiction. So many people ask struggle with this choice that we have decided to produce this article to help you make your asset protection decision. Switzerland minimum balances are $10,000 for a small bank, $25,000 for a medium bank, and $250,000 for a large well established bank. Panama banks on the other hand expect a very small minimum deposit. Swiss bankers do not like a declining balance over several months. If you operate your account in this way, depending on the age of your account, you may be asked to close your account. This is a very snobbish attitude, but very real. A new Swiss bank account holder should be wary of this restriction. Panama banks do not take issue with a large deposit followed by regular withdrawals. Today, the only real advantage Swiss banks have is their overwhelming size and stability. The problem is that they have become so large and respected they are really not an offshore jurisdiction anymore. They even require United States citizens to provide their social security number when opening a bank account! Panama, of course, does not require this information, since they do not co-operated with tax authorities anyway. (Panama has no tax treaties with anyone.) Switzerland banks are required to co-operated with other country's tax authorities. They have many tax treaties allowing tax information to flow freely. This makes them a poor offshore jurisdiction choice. Panama on the other hand does not co-operate with anyone regarding banking information. The only time this is broken is for criminal investigations, and then, the burden of proof by the requesting country is extremely high. (Tax evasion is not a crime in Panama and no MLAT requests are honored for tax evasion cases.) Although Swiss banks are larger than Panama banks, many people are now choosing Panama to protect their assets. Panama has much stronger bank secrecy laws, both on the books, and in practice. Panama banks are also very large and well established by anyone's standards.
Article Source: http://www.articlegush.com
If you are thinking about setting up an Asset Protection structure in Panama or Switzerland please consider read other OffshoreLegal.org information on www.offshorelegal.org/asset-protection/panama-offshore-asset-protection/panama-asset-protection.html Get your own completely unique content version of this article.
Please Rate this Article
5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5
Not yet Rated
