Offshore Company with an account in Switzerland, the EU or Hong Kong, or in a distant offshore bank? The best choice is not always reflected in a law firm's many years of experience, the age of a bank or the number of clients. First, let us formulate the question correctly: do you need a 'set of documents' or a fully functional instrument for working with money?

Do you want to make money? Or spend your time consulting lawyers and accountants? The answer is easy to predict...

When registering an offshore company, you should start not with choosing a country, but with choosing a bank for the offshore company. The issue is about money — specifically your money — and that money will not be kept on distant offshore islands.

There are quite a few 'myths' about offshore structures, carefully developed and proposed by lawyers with many years of financial-planning experience. The nuance is that all these structures are calculated to reduce taxation to 0% on profit.

And many 'offshore specialists' themselves believe that this is advantageous because they do not even have an elementary understanding of accounting — after all, profit is what remains after payment of all taxes (except personal income tax).

Having paid profit tax in Ukraine, for example, you can in any case issue yourself repayable financial assistance for, say, 50 years; alternatively, you can use a very carefully designed 'tax-minimisation structure' and obtain the same result.

If your purpose in acquiring an offshore company is to use a foreign company as an owner of real estate or shares, as an investor, trading agent or intermediary — that is, as an ordinary independent company — then the approach to choosing the country of incorporation should be completely different and should primarily take into account the possibility of opening a bank account with a European or Swiss bank, the standing of the jurisdiction and many other factors.

When browsing numerous advertisements and websites, you have probably asked yourself more than once what difference it makes where exactly to buy a classic offshore company (Belize, Seychelles, BVI, Hong Kong, Panama), or to order incorporation of a foreign holding company in an EU country.  

After all, the result will be roughly the same standard 'set of documents', will it not? Yes, you are 100% right if your objective is simply a package of documents and a company seal and you know exactly what to do with them.

But are you sure you will be able to open an account with the bank you need using this 'business kit'? That you will be able to work with local customs, notaries and state registrars in the CIS?

Ask whether the company selling the structure itself has an account with the bank it recommends in price lists using wording such as 'we will open an account with any bank'. 

And the lawyers of the company selling ready-made companies are not at fault here: these are 'your' problems, because they do not deal with finance and, as a rule, do not distinguish between the terms 'revenue' and 'profit', while persistently praising one jurisdiction or another for tax benefits and the supposed advantage of paying dividends to non-residents at a 0% rate. Quite right — they are correct again. There are indeed many structures in which dividends are paid at a 0% rate. For 'oligarchs'. But most likely not for you.

Numerous offshore seminars are constantly held on this subject, for example 'Holdings in Europe. Particularities of applying double-taxation treaties to payments of dividends, interest, royalties, etc.' And the 'lecturers' believe that this is advantageous because they are used to giving advice and have never tried to apply it in practice. Otherwise, they would not be earning money from seminars but would be doing what they describe so confidently.

What difference does it make to them that the term 'dividend' means the amount of money left after you have paid absolutely all taxes except personal income tax in your home country, including VAT and profit tax — on average 45–50% depending on the country? And in most CIS countries another 25% advance payment to the budget may also have to be paid. Did they forget to mention that again?

Why would they, if their task is to sell you a seminar and a consultation, draw a theoretical structure and wish you luck?

We will not discuss online all the shortcomings of the proposed business packages and public seminars. Simply think about it and draw the logical conclusion: why does a company run seminars and tell everyone about something it has never tried in practice?

Unfortunately, very often the cause of such business structures may be the elementary incompetence of the law-firm agent that helped register the foreign company. Although if the firm consists exclusively of lawyers, that is understandable: in local universities, lawyers unfortunately do not study even the basics of accounting and tax accounting, much less how the Western banking system actually works. Practice differs significantly from principles declared on paper.

Most likely, you will be 'gently' warned that the bank may ask certain questions about your business, advised to be ready for bankers' questions and to stock up on references and patience. Are you prepared to 'stock up', or do you need a guaranteed result?

Ask the company selling you an inexpensive ready-made offshore company with a name such as 'Trading Holding Worldwide Ltd' whether it guarantees that you will open an account with this document package at the specific bank 'N' that is convenient for your work. You are unlikely to receive a clear answer — there will be many 'ifs'.

Many companies proudly state that they have been in this market for 10 or 20 years and have enormous experience in the field. One would like to ask: in which field exactly? Giving useless advice and selling 'do-it-yourself' document packages? And if anything goes wrong, they shrug and sympathise, saying that people in the West do not like citizens from the former USSR and do not want to open accounts for them.

The cause of delay is usually the bank's lack of trust in the intermediary presenting the client and the law firm's inability to conduct a preliminary objective due diligence that will not raise doubts for the banker. How can a bank trust a company that does not even clearly understand the mechanism of taxation? How can such a company make an objective conclusion about the legality of the client's business and sources of funds?

In a normal situation, after preliminary assessment of the client (1–2 days), a European bank account is opened within 3–5 days without a personal visit to the bank. On the same day, rather than after 1–2 months, the Internet banking system is issued if the client needs it. And you begin successful business operations. 

We note that some Baltic banks did in fact take much longer to open accounts, and review of documents could take 10 to 20 days. 

A frequent reason was that the bank itself sold offshore companies, while you had bought a cheaper company elsewhere from a 'competitor'. The bank manager would persistently recommend that you acquire another, 'correct' offshore company so that the case would be reviewed faster and fewer questions would arise. Why? It is probably unnecessary to explain. For much the same reason that, in the former USSR, public officials sometimes reviewed applications for months. 

Why is it not advisable to buy a company on the recommendation of the bank where you intend to open the account? It is like asking a seller whether their goods are good. You need the result, not an illusion of reassurance.
By purchasing an offshore company on a bank's recommendation, you lose freedom of choice, not to mention confidentiality, which in that case will be governed not by offshore legislation but by fully transparent EU legislation. 

For the same reason, purchasing offshore companies from law firms in the European Union was also not recommended: EU legislation provided for disclosure of information about a law firm's client upon request, unlike offshore legislation or legislation in CIS countries.

How quickly do we open an account? If necessary, within 1–2 hours you will have the account details and an envelope with the password for Internet banking or a Digipass device.

How does this work with UBC? A good recommendation and relationship with the bank are sufficient. We have accounts with all the banks we recommend. 

We believe that a company or bank should be judged by the results of its work and its approach to business, not by the number of years it has 'survived' in the market or the length of time it has remained in one place. Which year do you need? We can sell you 100% of the shares of a company that has been doing business in Switzerland and the EU since 1930 and has already been in the market for almost 80 years. Will that change the bankers' attitude? NO!

Because a company is merely an instrument for business, just like the pen with which you sign a contract. What matters first is who signs, not what they sign with. 

Any bank can explain this perfectly, so which particular document package you bring to the bank in fact has little importance in modern banking. What matters is who brought the documents and who introduced the client — which is why the banking principle 'Know Your Customer' works.

Today a bank account can be opened very quickly: a bank is a private institution and decides for itself what it needs from a client. Modern communications and databases make it possible to check the accuracy of submitted information immediately; timing depends only on the workload of the responsible bank employee and how quickly they enter the request into the bank's AML check system.

If there are no negative records about you or your business in the AML database and there is a satisfactory recommendation, the account is opened quickly. Without a recommendation, be prepared for a lengthy process of completing various forms and questionnaires.

As a rule, in that situation you are not particularly interesting to the bank, so nobody will be in a hurry. Several months may pass before the bank's answer is ready. As a rule, if during that time you do not provide at least one European partner that previously worked with your business, the answer will be negative.

The view of offshore business set out above may differ from what you are accustomed to seeing on many other websites and from the approach traditionally promoted by most companies that provide only 'consultations'.

After the events of 2001 and the crisis of 2026, business changed, and 2026 changed the banking system and offshore business even further. Most companies were simply unable to adapt and continued to operate by offering outdated classic offshore structures.

These structures were so well known that, for example, the State Financial Monitoring Committee of Ukraine even 'approved' their use in an official document available to the public. Objectively, it was a well-prepared analytical collection of popular structures for the unlawful use of offshore companies for tax evasion and money laundering — we recommend reviewing it, so as not to violate tax law, which was similar across the CIS countries. It was quite possible that even then some lawyers would try to 'sell' these structures as exclusive advice on lawful tax minimisation.

We can assist you in creating a high-quality instrument for international business, while how to use it, in which country and how much tax to pay remain your decisions. In the modern world, countries compete to create the most comfortable conditions for business, investment and production, and you are free to choose where to be resident and pay the main taxes, because the development of communications and banking systems makes it possible to manage a business from anywhere in the world.

In conclusion, we quote from the decision in Helvering v Gregory, US Supreme Court: 'Every one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.'

Together with our European partners, we will be pleased to welcome you among our regular clients and partners and hope that our cooperation will enable your company to strengthen its market position and achieve maximum financial results.

We wish you success in business!