Secrecy Jurisdictions

An asset protection trust includes a clause preventing a trust beneficiary from passing his or her expected interest in the trust to a creditor. The Cook Islands created the world's first asset protection trust law in 1989. This was controversial because under its provisions the settler of the trust could also be a beneficiary, a feature generally making a trust void in the USA and UK. The law in question has now been copied by a large number of tax haven jurisdictions as part of the general “race to the bottom” in regulation. Controversially it has also been copied by some US states, including Delaware.