When I first got out of school the first company I worked for was wholly-owned by an ex-pat Canadian -- years before I came along he had moved to a tax-free base in Monte Carlo to escape Canadian income taxation (you need only stay out of the country for 183 days to validate and maintain your foreign status), and he had acquired company-owned homes/condos for accommodation purposes (hotel life gets old real fast) in each of London, Melbourne, Auckland, Toronto, Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Berlin and Zurich since the company had active operations in all those countries (we had about 1,000 employees)
Using this arrangement he ran the business as CEO by travelling around the globe from one city to the next to the next, staying 3 weeks here and 4 weeks there on a Monaco passport without ever invalidating his tourist/visitor status no matter where he went. Due to the corporate structure that Deloittes designed for him, he also never payed any taxes on his income except low treaty-rate withholding taxes at the source on any operating profits we couldn't otherwise hide using traditional tax minimization strategies (I can describe those structures in general if you're interested). On a global basis his total income tax load was well below 10%, and he's still doing the same thing to this very day
I've aspired to recreating some kind of similar setup for myself ever since -- however, I'm still working on the 1,000 employees part HAHAHA -- something smaller scale would do just fine |
