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Introduction: The History Of Offshore TrustsIt's a fairly well known fact that the trust originated in England many hundreds of years ago, and that its purpose was to preserve assets against depredations occurring through death, matrimonial and family squabbles, spendthrift descendants and the like. Taxation at death was one of the incidents that trusts were effective against, but they were not particularly designed to guard against the taxation of income or capital during the settlor's life, because such taxes were not a major threat to wealth at the time, and anyway a domestic trust was a taxable person in itself. Income tax was first levied in England at the beginning of the 20th century, and in many countries had become worth avoiding by mid-century; but initially at least the best way of avoiding it was to turn income into capital, which was not so heavily taxed. It was only when capital taxes of various types became significant that the offshore trust came into its heyday. Very rich people had begun to use offshore trusts in the first half of the century, but at least as much because of the additional asset protection that they offered, simply by being in a different jurisdiction, as because they were tax efficient. The administrative overhead and other complications of dealing with an offshore location were initially very great, so that at first only conveniently close-by jurisdictions like Jersey (Channel Isles) for the Brits and the Bahamas (for Americans) developed as 'offshore' jurisdictions. The first trusts legislation in the Bahamas, surprisingly, dates from 1893. The great expansion of trusts, both in terms of number of jurisdictions and volume of business, came later when telecommunications, air transport and the end of capital controls opened up the world and gave freedom to investors and the owners of capital.
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