What is called offshore zones and offshore companies?

Offshore zones are called areas (entire states or parts thereof) in which a preferential taxation. Most of the companies registered in offshore zones, does exempt from taxes, paying only token taxes and fees.


Typically, companies registered in offshore zones those entrepreneurs who are residents, ie, permanent residents of states with a relatively high level of taxes. Capital transfers in the offshore zone is a legitimate way to minimize the tax burden. Choice of an offshore zone due to business needs as offshore areas differ in the degree of political stability, for tax treatment, infrastructure, quality of banking services, the degree of legal protection of information on the activities of companies, in a variety of offshore, there all sorts of restrictions on certain activities. Differ in offshore areas and the cost of registering the company, services of local staff, the annual fees charged by the authorities.

The prototype of modern offshore originated in ancient Greece - Athens after the introduction of the tax on the export and import of the neighboring islands of the Aegean Sea became centers of free trade and unique stores smuggling. In the later middle ages the center of trade in Europe was Flanders, where they were very minor taxes.

Its transformation into a financial center of the world, Switzerland is obliged to the law passed in the XVIII century, the City Council of the Canton of Geneva. According to this Act, the bankers were forbidden in any form to disclose trade secrets related to the state of the bank accounts of their clients. In 1934, Switzerland adopted a similar law at the state level, turning it into a kind of offshore banking, in which there is no certain global norms of capital controls. In recent decades, the example of Switzerland followed by a number of States for which banking is a potentially major source of income (it is, in particular, Barbados, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, etc.).