Take part of what you’ve built beyond South Africa’s borders, properly.
For many founders, most of what they’ve built sits inside one country and one currency. We help you build offshore ownership architecture that creates real protection and real optionality, not just a tax conversation.
What this actually solves.
Five exposures, in the order founders usually feel them. Most people arrive worried about one and leave having addressed three.
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Country risk
Everything you own banks, contracts and litigates inside one legal and political system. That is a single point of failure, not a prediction about it.
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Currency risk
You earn and hold in rands. Your children may study, work or live in dollars, euros or pounds. Your real wealth is your statement translated at a rate you do not control, on a date you cannot choose.
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Succession
Cross-border succession is slow, expensive and public when it is unplanned. It is none of those things when the holding structure was built to carry it.
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Family optionality
The ability for the next generation to receive value in a currency and jurisdiction they can actually use, without a transaction that takes eighteen months and a committee.
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International expansion
A holding structure that can take an offshore shareholder, hold offshore IP, or invoice an offshore customer without being redesigned each time.
How it typically works.
The shape is usually simpler than founders expect. A fiduciary vehicle (a trust or a foundation) sits at the top and holds the long-term intent. Beneath it, one or more holding entities own the actual assets: shares, investments, intellectual property, property. Operating businesses stay where they are and sit below the holding layer rather than inside the fiduciary one.
The separation is the point. Mixing what holds value with what does business is the single most common reason a later sale, restructure or succession event turns expensive.
Choosing the jurisdiction
Jurisdiction follows purpose, not reputation. What matters in practice is the treaty position relative to South Africa, whether the vehicle you need is recognised there, the substance and reporting the regime expects, the quality and continuity of local fiduciary providers, and how the jurisdiction is regarded by banks and buyers you may deal with later. Cheap and obscure is expensive within a decade.
We hold and administer structures across seven jurisdictions:
What it is not
It is not moving money out of South Africa quietly. Every structure we build is declarable, declared, and designed on the assumption that a revenue authority will one day read it. Structures that depend on not being looked at are not structures.
What this looks like in practice.
A founder in her late fifties owns 80% of a manufacturing business she started in 2004. Two children, one living abroad. Everything she owns is rand-denominated, and the business is roughly three quarters of her net worth. There is a family trust, set up in 2011, which holds a holiday property and nothing else.
The trigger is not tax. It is that her daughter is settling permanently in the Netherlands and she has no idea how value would reach her.
The work: a review of the existing trust, which turns out to have no minuted resolutions after 2016; an offshore holding structure established to hold a minority interest in the operating company plus a new offshore investment allocation; a distribution mechanism that lets either child receive value in their own currency without unwinding anything; and a governance calendar covering both South African and offshore obligations. Her accountant keeps the compliance work. Her attorney drafts. The sequencing runs across roughly a year, because doing it in three months would have meant choosing the vehicle before answering what it was for.
Governance is built in, not sold separately.
An offshore structure creates obligations in more than one jurisdiction, indefinitely. Every structure we build comes with a governance retainer rather than a signature and a handshake.
A structure nobody maintains is a structure that was correct once.
Not just tax efficiency.
Tax matters, and it is often part of why a structure is shaped one way rather than another. But a founder who takes only the tax question to an advisor gets a tax answer, and tax answers age badly: regimes change, treaties are renegotiated, and a structure built for a rate is a structure with nothing left when the rate moves.
What does not age is optionality. The ability to move value, to bring in a shareholder, to hand something to a child on terms you chose, to say yes to an offer without a year of restructuring first. That is what the architecture is for, and it is why the first conversation is about what you want to become possible rather than about a vehicle.
General information about structuring and governance, written for founders. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and it does not take your circumstances into account.