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by yamtaddle 1199 days ago
From what I've gathered from various schemes like this, including smaller-fry ones, it seems like the minimum requirement is to have enough Serious Business Shit going on that you can plausibly mask a bunch of activity (international, ideally) as part of that. Normal people don't.

You've also got to have enough money that any tax authority looking at you decides you'd be an expensive target, so they won't try it unless they're sure it's a slam-dunk.

1 comments

OK, if we assume that it only works if you can hide a small amount of illicit activity in a flurry of legit activity, it can't be such a large problem; maybe you can make 5% of your transactions illicit, but not even 50%. I don't think this is the case with Russian oligarchs right now.

I always had thought that the idea of shell companies is that there is a long chain, or even DAG, of companies that own basically nothing but obligations of other such companies, and the structure is large enough that tracing it back to the original masters and beneficiaries becomes infeasible.

If running a typical no-op LLC is $200-300 a year, running 30 of them is $6-9k, not an entirely trivial amount but quite feasible for anyone interested to hide even mere $200-300k of illicit activities, like selling a moderate-size home.

we cant accurately enough guess how these boutique wealth management firms do their thing... but we could pay them to do the guessing for us.
>we could pay them to do the guessing for us.

No we can’t. Their clients would drop them with prejudice if they even suggested serving commoners.

They can chose the persecution if they insist?