With all the articles written about how to protect assets, it is important we take a break now and look at possible disasters that could occur if you are not careful. You are trusting other people to keep your secrets and to keep your money safe, so you need to know you can trust them. It is easy to fall into a trap or scam and lose all your assets to a common criminal if you are not careful. It is also easy to get taken down in court if you do not cover all your activities. Here are a few common bad things that can happen from investing in the wrong country:

• Some countries do not protect attorney-client privacy as much as others do. In these countries, your lawyer can be forced to reveal information about you with his head on the line. Do you really want to leave your assets up in the air on whether or not your lawyer respects you and likes you enough to go to jail for you? Who in your life would do that for you?
• Many of these countries have unfair legal systems in the first place. In this system, you are fighting an uphill, and impossible, battle from the beginning. Don’t get caught in a trap!
• You will have most likely have already paid your lawyer in advance for appearing in court. If you have paid him and he is being pressured by a judge to reveal information, why not reveal it? What is going to happen to him? He won’t go to jail, he’ll still make his payday and he will still find a foreigner who doesn’t know his track record to pick up as a client.
• Once your privacy is gone, who is going to save your assets? The only thing protecting your assets in court is that no one can prove you own them. Guess what? Your lawyer can! If you are in a country where it is possible for your lawyer to give up your secrets, you are as good as giving away your valuable assets for nothing.
• In addition, your foes at home don’t even have to leave their country. These countries have no problem helping oversea investigations and will readily give your information, that they get out of your lawyer, to the American courts.

Now look at what Panama offers you. They protect the privacy between a lawyer and his client by the law. They punish those who do not follow this law by huge fines and jail time. They will not cooperate in international cases unless it can be proven to no doubt that you are a major criminal. They have a legal system which, if anything, is biased towards helping offshore accounts stay private.

So yes, it is easy to fall into traps and only a fool would invest his money without knowing these short comes he could run into. But you won’t have any problems in Panama with an unfair court or illegal probing methods.