First and foremost: A chain is as strong as its weakest link. So you do not use a consultant who works in the country where you are making your money. Repeating this for anyone slow witted. If you are making money in the USA, and wish to perform transactions outside the USA that you would prefer to remain private YOU DO NOT TRANSACT THROUGH A USA CONSULTANT. DO NOT USE A USA BASED CONSULTANT! The American IRS, and other bodies hostile to privacy, regularly go after such consultants, accuse them of real or imaginary crimes, threaten them with jail and sometimes with a rubber hose, and force them to sing like canaries. Worse still, a great many of them continue right on in the financial consultancy business while continuing to sing like canaries. So first and foremost you do not use a consultant that is subject to the violence of those that you most fear. Use a friend or a relative who is in a foreign country. Blood is thicker than water, relatives are better. No suitable relatives? Subscribe to foreign financial newspapers, and read the ads, subscribe to some of the newsletters advertised or reviewed in those newspapers. You might wish to subscribe to AGI PO Box 4010 6304 Zug Switzerland. This advertises stockbrokers, banks, and mutual funds all over the world that accept international transactions. That is a suggestion, not a recommendation. Do your own homework, and check your family tree for relatives dispersed around the world. OK, what comes second. Well second, third, fourth and fifth, same as above, do not use a consultant who is subject to the violence of those you most fear. Somewhere way down the list ... About thirty seventh down the list: All financial institutions that are beyond the violence of those you fear the most, are good. All of them! All of them! Even in countries quite hostile to privacy, they do not turn over financial information en masse to a foreign power, even when that foreign power is the USA. Say you fear the USA the most, and you have a bank account in another country. Say you have a bank account in Australia, a country with high taxes, absolutely no banking privacy, a country that routinely and regularly grovels to the USA. Even so, the ones you fear still have to find out that the account exists, information that they discover in the USA and *then* they have to ask their opposite number in Australia, "Hey, I did a favor for you, can you do a favor for me, pretty please with sugar on top?" If the enemy already have that kind of information on your financial doings, and they are keen enough on getting you that they are willing to do things that are special and out of the ordinary, then your goose is cooked anyway, regardless of whether your account is Australia or Liechtenstein. So who gives a tinkers dam? What points one to thirty seven boil down to is quite simple. The key question about any financial institution is: Can the revenuers kick down the door and pistol whip the operator if he fails to make everything in his computer totally and completely available to the revenuers? It really is that simple. If you are afraid of USA revenuers, then the difference between a USA bank, and a USA financial privacy consultant is so slight that it is not even worth thinking about. The difference between a Swiss bank and an Australian bank is small. The big difference is the difference between a USA entity and a foreign entity. Ignore all the mysterious arcane legalistic complexities uttered by the self proclaimed financial experts. It really is not very complicated at all. Simply apply the pistol whip question. Nothing else counts for very much. If a financial institution fails the pistol whip test, then its computers have a line to the IRS echoing everything that happens. If they do not have such a line now, they will very soon. If it passes the pistol whip test, then there is no line to the IRS. The IRS might be able to get information if they ask nicely about a particular person, but they will have to ask nicely and they cannot simply say: "Dump everything you have to our computers and make sure it is in a form that our computers like, and if something makes our computers hiccup, you're gonna sweat." I repeat: The key question is "Can they kick down the door and pistol whip the guy who owns the computers?" All other questions, such as what does the law say, and what legal system the institution operates under, are comparatively insignificant. Now obviously some banks are better than others. For most people this is not an important difference, but there is a difference. Now if you are a big time drug dealer living in exile, yeah, you had better worry about the fine detail of a nations banking secrecy laws. In that case the difference between Switzerland and Liechtenstein might be important to you. But fussing over the details of a countries banking laws is like worrying about sources of randomness in session keys. It is not likely to make the slightest difference in practice. Of all the banks that have some degree of secrecy, Swiss banks are the best, not that they have the strongest secrecy, but because they are real banks, they are not just post office boxes, and the same laws apply to everyone. Your money is safe in Switzerland not because they are trying to lure foreign hot money -- in fact they are trying to exclude foreign hot money. You almost have to sneak your money into Switzerland in the same way you sneak it out of the US. Your money is safe in Switzerland because Swiss property is safe in Switzerland. In Switzerland you are protected by Swiss liberty, not by foreign privilege. For your enemies to get information about your Swiss bank account, they are going to have to know what you have been up to. And, knowing what you are up to, they are not going to merely have to ask a favor, as they would in most countries. They are going to have to go before a foreign court. They are going to have to jump through legalistic hoops that they did not write in a court that they cannot control. They will have to deal with powerful people on those peoples home ground. They are profoundly reluctant to do this. It makes them feel weak and helpless. Unless they know you are up to something *and* they have serious hots for you, they are not going to do it. So unless you are a foreign dictator that the US might wish to overthrow, or unless you got the IRS chief's daughter pregnant and skipped town, you really do not need to give a dam. And if you attract their attention, and seriously upset them, then nothing is safe. They will obtain the key to that Liechtenstein safety deposit box by bribery, illegal methods, and by threatening people with massive baseless lawsuits. (This happened to one famous tax resister. The King of Liechtenstein will tell them to go eat shit, but a lawyer in Liechtenstein will roll over like a puppy dog.) Or they will lock you up in solitary, with your only source of conversation being thirty hour chat sessions with IRS agents with bright lights shining in your eyes, until you are willing to confess that you killed Kennedy and you were Jack the Ripper and you damn well give them the key. Which brings to point thirty eight, the least and slightest of the matters you should keep in mind. Obviously some institutions and some countries are more vulnerable to persuasion and pressure by foreigners than others. I am told the King of Liechtenstein is strongly resistant. Doubtless this is true. But if there are two financial institutions, and one is a major Swiss bank, and one is actually a lawyer operating a mail drop, guess which one rolls over first, even if the lawyer is located in Liechtenstein. One needs to consider both the reputation of the country and the reputation of the institution. (You might also consider that, on the other hand, the hole-in-the-wall lawyer in Liechtenstein can give you facilities that achieve much the same thing as a fiduciary account at a price you can afford, whereas a big Swiss bank would not give you a fiduciary account unless you had serious money. Yet again you might consider that something like a fiduciary account is ridiculous overkill for most people) But I repeat, compared to the vast difference between someone they can pistol whip, and someone they cannot pistol whip, the difference between two people, neither of whom can be pistol whipped, is very slight. It really does not matter that much. Just get your money out of gunshot. Legal technicalities would only matter if the government gave a shit about legal technicalities. Once your money is out of gunshot, it really does not make a very big difference where you put it. Go for decent rates of return, and ignore too-clever-by-half secrecy schemes. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we James A. Donald are. True law derives from this right, not from jamesd@acm.org the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.