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Nope, nope, nope. If it was just about registering a company somewhere else and your home tax authorities had no jurisdiction, every company in the world, small or big would be incorporated in tax havens like the British Virgin Islands only. If a company is controlled from the UK, you can bet your bottom dollar that the UK tax authorities have jurisdiction. Only a very small minority, mostly less well-developed countries allow you to incorporate elsewhere without having to pay tax and report where you are. Corporate tax residence internationally tends not to be a matter of where a company is registered, but from where it is effectively controlled. This is a matter of fact, not a matter of paperwork, so you can't get around it by just appointing a buddy to sign papers who lives in the right country. Not only that, incorporating elsewhere opens a world of complexity, pain and double taxation.
A simple example:
A US LLC with more than one owner is usually taxed as a partnership - eg, US tax is due at individual marginal rates.
The UK on the other hand treats US LLCs as "opaque", which means they'd want to tax it as a corporation (there are legal cases to this fact).
So a UK resident LLC owner could end up having to pay up to 39.6% tax in the US, then 20% AGAIN on the very same income in the UK, before having extracted a single cent from the company.
Then if they extract money from it, there's an additional up to 38.1% dividend tax, for a whopping 90% marginal tax rate. Now, double taxation treaties _may_ come to the rescue, but I wouldn't bet on it being without a fight through the courts to prove they apply. |