Clients always want to know what’s involved in searching offshore for hidden assets. Our usual answer is, “time and a lot more money than it’s probably worth, unless you’re looking for millions of dollars.”
Suddeutsche Zeitung, one of the recipients of the leaked Panama Papers reported that one lawyer “represented a female client in a divorce case, and it cost $2 to $3 million to uncover and disentangle the web of front companies into which the assets had been poured by her husband. That is a lawyer’s fee not many are able to pay.”
While not every divorce case involves many millions, even an onshore search follows the same principles: look not just for money in the name of the person but in the name of secret companies that person created.
As I wrote in my just published book, The Art of Fact Investigation, “Given how quickly and cheaply people can set up limited liability companies (and even ordinary corporations) it is folly to assume that a person who may be concealing assets would not have availed him or herself of this simple mechanism.”
Unless there is hard evidence that a person has hidden assets offshore, we like to start onshore for a few simple reasons:
- It’s a lot cheaper, and if you find a good haul of assets you may find your way to a reasonable settlement. The extra money offshore could still be there, but it may not make financial sense to go after it because of the fees and the length of time it could take to litigate in Caribbean and other tax havens.
- It’s easier to find onshore side companies because of the much larger store of public information in the U.S. compared with most overseas jurisdictions.
- The onshore records may provide good leads to the offshore companies. You may find a property deed notarized in the Cayman Islands or Isle of Man, for example. If you get the tax returns in discovery to a new onshore company, you could see payments from an offshore company that could end up being the subject’s secret company.
Wherever you look for secret companies, a few similar search rules apply. These include the propensity to use the same name in multiple companies. We’ve seen net worth statements with Alpha I and Alpha II listed, but the person has omitted Alphas III, IV and V. Other common names include streets the subject grew up on, names of summer camps, favorite pets, or combinations of children’s names or initials.
Offshore or Onshore, people are people and tend to behave the same way the world over when it comes to stashing their cash.
Want to know more?
- Visit charlesgriffinllc.com and see our two blogs, The Ethical Investigator and the Divorce Asset Hunter;
- Look at my book, The Art of Fact Investigation (available in free preview for Kindle at Amazon);
- Watch me speak about Helping Lawyers with Fact Finding, here.