Shell companies are just companies without offices. You can use corporate entities to organize assets, create trusts, hold certain obligations, create joint ven

Shell companies are just companies without offices. You can use corporate entities to organize assets, create trusts, hold certain obligations, create joint ventures, provide equity to align interests, etc. All of these things are beneficial. If you treat this like a game and try to win it, though, the 'building block' of legal personhood can be broken. The mechanics aren't perfect. You can book profits to one entity, then losses to another by creating 'fake' intercompany transactions, despite the fact that your organization as a whole is net even. We have rules that attempt to deal with these problems in arms-length transactions - regulators get to check if the contract payment amounts make sense. If you do this with IP, which is hard to value, tax offices have significant issues disputing the value of the inter-company contracts. You use this issue to toss losses between various national corporations to take advantage of problems with individual tax regimes. The double irish/dutch sandwich technique is a great example. But eventually the chickens need to come home to roost, right? Well, not really. Tax haven jurisdictions basically allow you to park money which you've obtained via your tax avoidance system in an account nearly indefinitely. You'll generally need to pay for a resident or residents to sit on the board of your tax haven jurisdiction corporation board, which lets them scalp 50-250k a year from you, but if you're hoarding billions, it's irrelevant. IF you're a normal joe, however, the accounting, legal and director fees kill you. Oddly, if you look at the leadership structures in place in most tax havens, they look a lot like a bunch of banker expatriates from various financial hubs (hi London!) took over a country that has good weather and nothing else going for it. The locals receive the windfall of money via directorships and other ancillary financial services, the rich get to hide their money, the companies get to defer tax payments for as long as they want. The only people who don't benefit are the people left holding the tax bag. Oh wait, that's most of us.