4 ms·

Interesting case. I also live in the Philippines and I have been looking into starting a company here. I have been looking into info on "PEZA" - the Philippine

by gexla 12y ago

Interesting case. I also live in the Philippines and I have been looking into starting a company here. I have been looking into info on "PEZA" - the Philippines Economic Zone Authority. It appears that for corporations which have 100% income coming in from abroad (which I assume you qualify for) you can get around many of the painful things that other corporations have to do. For example, your corporation could be 100% foreign owned. Could you have just started a new corporation and simply started all business as part of that new corporation without "Karen's" involvement? I don't think this is a PEZA item, I believe this is the case for any business in this situation. ETA: You probably can't answer this, but I noticed that if you are in a free economic zone with the same situation as above, you can get a tax holiday for X years. To get this, your business has to be physically located in one of these zones though. I'm wondering about the possibility of setting up a mail drop with a virtual office company which is located in a "PEZA" building. ETA ETA: I can definitely identify with the feeling you get when you believe someone is trying to rip you off. I think that's unfortunate and may hold people back. In some cases, I see foreigners lose their professionalism and take things way too personally. Good job on getting through this.

justincooke 12y ago
Joe knows a bit more about the details here than I do, but I can say that we've qualified for the tax exemption status. Additionally, our corporate structure in the Philippines is like this: - 95% owned by a US Corporation - 1% owned by each of us (2% total) - 1% owned by 3 individual Filipinos (3% total) This approach is less common for companies as small as us, apparently, but we're pretty happy with how it worked out. I think we lucked out working with a law office that was aware of and familiar with this setup. I DON'T think we could have necessarily avoided the lawsuit by just setting up another corporation here in the Philippines. We COULD have set it up, of course, but our attorney said it was likely to catch up with us. Something about the new business being a mirror/shell of the old one. The worry being that, at some point in the future, they'd latch on to our new corporation's bank account again.

by gexla 12y ago

justincooke 12y ago

Joe knows a bit more about the details here than I do, but I can say that we've qualified for the tax exemption status. Additionally, our corporate structure in the Philippines is like this: - 95% owned by a US Corporation - 1% owned by each of us (2% total) - 1% owned by 3 individual Filipinos (3% total) This approach is less common for companies as small as us, apparently, but we're pretty happy with how it worked out. I think we lucked out working with a law office that was aware of and familiar with this setup. I DON'T think we could have necessarily avoided the lawsuit by just setting up another corporation here in the Philippines. We COULD have set it up, of course, but our attorney said it was likely to catch up with us. Something about the new business being a mirror/shell of the old one. The worry being that, at some point in the future, they'd latch on to our new corporation's bank account again.