How safe is your money offshore?

If you are not doing anything illegal according to the laws in Panama your assets are completely safe.  There grey areas where an outside government may come after someone's assets in Panama, even if the illeged activity was not a crime in Panama.  In such cases, Panama does NOT cooperate with investigating authorities.

There are two types of threats from exterior forces.  Lets deal with the first, and most easily dealt with, for now. These threats are the peaceful countries looking for information on criminals who may be hiding their illegal earnings in these offshore accounts. Panama requires a couple things to happen before they let these countries to look into their offshore accounts.

• To start out with, the country must start the prosecution process in their own land on the accused criminal. Panama does not allow any government to look into files of people who have not yet been accused of a crime.
• Second, the government must request these files from the Panama government. They cannot start their investigation without a court order from Panama that gives them the power to. This allows Panama to seed out claims which do not have much behind them.
• Finally, and most importantly, Panama only responds to claims under certain crimes. They do not care about non-criminal issues such as divorce settlements or minor crimes such as tax evasion. They have a set standard of what is considered bad enough for investigation and they stick to it.
• Also note that Panama, in most cases, does not want to cooperate in these cases and the officials really need to be convinced of the importance of said evidence to give it up.

It is also important to note that these matters often get tied up in court for long periods of times, months to years, and can drag on forever. This process is not quick by any means and the Panama courts make sure they get it right. It is also important to realize the court orders issued by governments outside of Panama have no bearing on cases. Bank officials are trained to hang up the phone without giving up any information. They know that only the proper Panama court order can be used to tie up offshore bank accounts.

Panama does not like intervention from outside governments. They do respond to calls and they do sometimes freeze bank accounts and reveal information that was previously private, but not happily. If you stay within the legal bounds of the country, you will not find one day that your information has been compromised. Guaranteed.