[ForHackernews]

Most of these offshore tax shelters are not illegal. It's just shady that wealthy individuals and organizations can stash their millions and billions away from public scrutiny and avoid paying taxes on them.

It's particularly egregious in the case of ostensibly not-for-profit educational institutions.

[toyg]

Yes and no. These arrangements are often grounds for prosecution once they come to light. Just because moving money from A to B and from B to C is legal, it doesn't mean that going from A to C is still legal.

Tax authorities usually struggle to reconstruct the entire chain, so they don't prosecute... until somebody else does the job for them, and then they piggyback.