Someone who buys a $50 million painting at auction in New York, for example, is staring at a $4.4 million sales tax bill. Ship it to a free port, and the bill d

Someone who buys a $50 million painting at auction in New York, for example, is staring at a $4.4 million sales tax bill. Ship it to a free port, and the bill disappears, at least until you decide to bring it back to New York. and Despite enhanced Swiss efforts to track inventory and ownership, the free ports there remain an opaque preserve (though more transparent these days than counterparts in places like Singapore), filled with objects whose ownership can be confoundingly convoluted. You keep it there until the value appreciates substantially, the item can stay there are long as you need it to. As the article mentions, the problem with these warehouses has been that there's been very little visibility of what is actually being stored as they become black holes into which these treasures disappear. I suspect many of these objects aren't directly owned by the super-rich individuals themselves, but are owned by offshore companies with hugely obfuscated paper trails that detach any tax liability from their human owners. Also: Collectors and dealers choose to store art in the free ports for more pedestrian reasons than tax avoidance. Some simply have no more room in their homes, said Georgina Hepburne Scott, who advises collectors. And in a free port, their property is protected in climate-controlled environments, often under video surveillance and behind fire-resistant walls.