Corporate haven, corporate tax haven, or multinational tax haven is used to describe a jurisdiction that multinational corporations find attractive for establishing subsidiaries or incorporation of regional or main company headquarters, mostly due to favourable tax regimes, and/or favourable secrecy laws, and/or favourable regulatory regimes.
A shell corporation is a company or corporation with no significant assets or operations often formed to obtain financing before beginning business. It may hold passive investments or be the registered owner of assets, such as intellectual property, or ships. Shell companies may be registered to the address of a company that provides a service setting up shell companies, and which may act as the agent for receipt of legal correspondence. The company may serve as a vehicle for business transactions without itself having any significant assets or operations.
The International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) is an area of central Dublin and part of the CBD established in the 1980s as an urban regeneration area and special economic zone (SEZ) on the derelict state-owned former port authority lands of the reclaimed North Wall and George's Dock areas of the Dublin Docklands. The term has become a metonym for the Irish financial services industry as well as being used as an address and still being classified as an SEZ.
Harney Westwood & Riegels is a global offshore law firm that provides advice on British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Bermuda and Anguilla law to an international client base that includes law firms, financial institutions, investment funds, and private individuals. They have locations in major financial centers across Europe, Asia, the Americas and the Caribbean.
The offshore magic circle is the set of the largest multi-jurisdictional law firms who specialise in offshore financial centres, especially the laws of the British Overseas Territories of Bermuda, Cayman Islands, and British Virgin Islands, and the Crown dependencies of Jersey and Guernsey.
Appleby is a leading offshore legal services provider.
Conyers is an international law firm. Their client base includes FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies, international finance houses and asset managers. The firm advises on law practiced in Bermuda, British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands. Conyers Headquarters is situated in Hamilton, Bermuda and has international offices in Hong Kong, London and Singapore. Conyers also provides several corporate, trust, compliance, governance and accounting and management services.
Ogier is a law firm with offices in the BVI, the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Ireland, Jersey and Luxembourg. It is a member of the offshore magic circle.
Walkers is a Cayman Islands headquartered offshore law firm. Walkers provides legal, corporate, compliance and fiduciary services to global corporations, financial institutions, capital markets participants and investment fund managers. Walkers practices the laws of six jurisdictions from ten offices globally. It is a member of the offshore magic circle.
A tax haven is a term, sometimes used negatively and for political reasons, to describe a place with very low tax rates for non-domiciled investors, even if the official rates may be higher.
Ugland House is a building located in George Town, Cayman Islands. Located at 121 South Church Street, the building is occupied by the law firm Maples and Calder and is the registered office address for 40,000 entities, including many major investment funds, international joint ventures and capital market issuers.
Anthony Travers, OBE was the chairman of the Board of Cayman Finance from 2009 to 2011. Travers is also the Chairman of the Cayman Islands Stock Exchange and former Senior Partner and Managing Partner of international law firm Maples and Calder. He has over thirty years experience in all aspects of Cayman Islands law, particularly mutual funds, structured finance, insurance and private client, and has throughout advised Government on the development of Cayman Islands legislation.
An offshore financial centre (OFC) is defined as a "country or jurisdiction that provides financial services to nonresidents on a scale that is incommensurate with the size and the financing of its domestic economy."
Mourant is an offshore law firm headquartered in Saint-Helier, Jersey. Mourant is one of the largest offshore law firms, with just over 70 partners and 700+ staff. It is a member of the offshore magic circle.
In 2010, the United States implemented the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act; the law required financial firms around the world to report accounts held by US citizens to the Internal Revenue Service. The US on the other hand refused the Common Reporting Standard set up by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, alongside Vanuatu and Bahrain.
Conduit OFC and sink OFC is an empirical quantitative method of classifying corporate tax havens, offshore financial centres (OFCs) and tax havens.
Matheson, is an Irish law firm partnership based in the IFSC in Dublin, which specialises in multinational tax schemes, and tax structuring of special purpose vehicles. Matheson is estimated to be Ireland's largest corporate law firm. Matheson state in the International Tax Review that their tax department is: "significantly the largest tax practice group amongst Irish law firms".
Ireland has been labelled as a tax haven or corporate tax haven in multiple financial reports, an allegation which the state has rejected in response. Ireland is on all academic "tax haven lists", including the § Leaders in tax haven research, and tax NGOs. Ireland does not meet the 1998 OECD definition of a tax haven, but no OECD member, including Switzerland, ever met this definition; only Trinidad & Tobago met it in 2017. Similarly, no EU–28 country is amongst the 64 listed in the 2017 EU tax haven blacklist and greylist. In September 2016, Brazil became the first G20 country to "blacklist" Ireland as a tax haven.
Qualifying Investor Alternative Investment Fund or QIAIF is a Central Bank of Ireland regulatory classification established in 2013 for Ireland's five tax-free legal structures for holding assets. The Irish Collective Asset-management Vehicle or ICAV is the most popular of the five Irish QIAIF structures, it is the main tax-free structure for foreign investors holding Irish assets.
James R. Hines Jr. is an American economist and a founder of academic research into corporate-focused tax havens, and the effect of U.S. corporate tax policy on the behaviors of U.S. multinationals. His papers were some of the first to analyse profit shifting, and to establish quantitative features of tax havens. Hines showed that being a tax haven could be a prosperous strategy for a jurisdiction, and controversially, that tax havens can promote economic growth. Hines showed that use of tax havens by U.S. multinationals had maximized long-term U.S. exchequer tax receipts, at the expense of other jurisdictions. Hines is the most cited author on the research of tax havens, and his work on tax havens was relied upon by the CEA when drafting the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
