How Business Titans, Pop Stars and Royals Hide Their Wealth<br />Asiaciti set up trusts in the Cook Islands for Kevin Trudeau, an infomercial pitchman in the United States with a trail of legal<br />troubles who sold millions of copies of such self-help books as “The Weight-Loss Cure ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About.”<br />Founded in 1898 by a British officer, Maj. Reginald Appleby — an avowed opponent of taxation — Appleby now has offices in nearly all the world’s tax havens:<br />Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Guernsey, Hong Kong, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Mauritius, the Seychelles and Shanghai.<br />Ray D. Madoff, a professor of law at Boston College who focuses on philanthropies and taxes, said<br />that in terms of oversight and transparency, “the first sin was whatever it was that allowed however many billions of dollars of a U. S. citizen to be growing tax free in Bermuda.”<br />But Michael G. Pfeifer, a Washington lawyer who specializes in estate planning for wealthy people<br />and helped write the tax rules governing overseas trusts, said that Mr. Simons merely followed the rules.<br />But Mr. Simons and Mr. Stephens are both billionaires who have used the services of offshore finance — the trusts and shell companies<br />that the world’s wealthiest people use to park their money beyond the reach of tax collectors and out of the public eye.<br />Yet factoring the trust into his wealth isn’t so straightforward,<br />because Mr. Simons says his share is now in an offshore charity, Simons Foundation International.<br />Appleby appears to be more scrupulous than another offshore firm, Panama-based Mossack Fonseca, about shunning overtly corrupt<br />and criminal clients, based on a comparison of the Appleby files with the leaked Panama Papers, which drew global coverage last year.
