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11 Mar, 2013
With its low tax, business friendly ‘E-Zone’ legislation, advanced telecommunications infrastructure, and sophisticated business environment, the Caribbean island of Curaao is now a very attractive proposition for e-commerce companies looking to locate operations or back-up facilities in the Americas region.
The jurisdiction of Curaao was created on October 10, 2010 when the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved and became two separate jurisdictions, the second being Sint Maarten. At the same time, the other three islands that made up the Netherlands Antilles (Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba) became special overseas municipalities of the Netherlands. Curaao lies about 50 km north of Venezuela and is about 2.5 hours by air from Miami.
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06 Mar, 2013
A tropical paradise in the centre of the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles has successfully transitioned from an agricultural to a services-based economy within which tourism dominates. However, the government has actively encouraged the development of offshore financial services, and the finance industry now constitutes the ‘third pillar’ of the economy.
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20 Feb, 2013
Offshore financial centers have long acted as a linking channel for investment between “high tax” countries, and this feature examines how modern international business trends and the demand for ever more sophisticated corporate structures has fueled the demand for offshore legal services. There has always been a certain level of demand for offshore legal services, particularly in the sphere of wealth management and asset protection. Understanding trust laws in a foreign jurisdiction often requires specialist help, and it can be difficult to establish complex corporate structures from afar, hence the presence of well-established networks of legal and corporate services providers in most offshore jurisdictions.
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06 Feb, 2013
As one of the first British dependent territories to develop tax-exempt corporate forms, Gibraltar has a long history as an offshore financial center, with the focus initially on the traditional forms of offshore business like company incorporation, banking, investment holding, shipping and trust management. The arrival of the internet however has seen the jurisdiction develop into one of the worldÂ’s foremost e-gaming and gambling company domiciles.
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05 Nov, 2012
In this article, we take a look at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) ongoing efforts to reform certain aspects of the Model Tax Convention, particularly with respect to recent proposals on changes to the ‘beneficial ownership’ and ‘permanent establishment’ articles, and tax treaty treatment of emissions permits.
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31 Oct, 2012
In this article on some key recent developments in shipping and aviation taxation, we focus heavily on events in the European Union (EU) where Malta's burgeoning maritime industry is under considerable threat due to a state aid investigation by the European Commission, and where the aviation sector is confronting some taxing issues.
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22 Oct, 2012
With flexible and responsive regulatory systems and low or zero rates of taxation, it is not surprising that the internet gaming industry has a found its home offshore. Those jurisdictions which have invested in an appropriate legal framework and advanced telecommunications infrastructure have generally reaped the benefits of the rapid growth in this sector over the last decade. The tiny Caribbean territory of Antigua and Barbuda, and the Mediterranean island of Malta, a member of the European Union (EU), are two such jurisdictions. However, legislative and regulatory developments in the United States and the EU have put the very existence of the internet gambling industry in these places under threat, with disastrous economic consequences, actual in the first case and potential in the second.
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09 Aug, 2012
Thanks in large part to the Canal, shipping is one of PanamaÂ’s strongest economic pillars, alongside banking, financial services and tourism. A thriving re-export industry has grown up in recent decades centred on the Colon Free Zone, and the country is home to tens of thousands of international companies chiefly as a result of its benign tax regime and strong confidentiality laws. PanamaÂ’s low taxes and sub-tropical climate have also attracted a large community of expat pensioners, particularly from the United States. There are also a range of incentives for domestic and foreign investors alike.
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