Business card substitute: What is "offshore"?

Welcome to "Investment Navigator+" to all of you viewing it the first time. My name is Shinobu Miyata.

Just saying my name alone probably won’t ring a bell for most ordinary people. In fact, if someone says they know me, I would be surprised (laughs).

For the past roughly 12 years, I have been providing a platform that manages the entire process of setting up funds offshore for sale in Japan, bringing them to Japan, accepting the funds from Japanese investors, operating and managing the funds, and then winding them down when finished.

Even if I say that, it probably won’t click right away. Some people might be surprised that such a thing can be a business, but that’s only if you’re familiar with the fund business; even for people generally interested in investment, we have to start from questions like "What is a fund?" or "What is offshore?" so it’s quite difficult for them to understand what I do.

However, over the past 12 years on such a "platform," we have repeatedly built, operated, and liquidated a platform that has held assets of around 250 billion yen on average, up to about 350 billion yen at most, which has been fairly valued within the investment industry.

Now, while engaging in such a niche business within the vast world of investment, our main arena being offshore, recent attention from the public due to the so-called Panama Papers has drawn attention to offshore (though in an unfortunate way). Still, it's not solely because of that; there has long been an aura of secrecy and exclusivity, making it seem accessible only to the very wealthy, which contributes to this perception:

"Offshore is seen as a place for tax evasion or investment fraud—an inherently negative image."

I strongly feel this. Wasn’t it French economist Piketty, last year’s talk about growing inequality, who criticized offshore for helping avoid taxation on assets? I became the target of such criticisms, which was quite inconvenient.

Originally, even before the Panama Papers, in Japan the AIJ case had already left the impression that the fraud technique involved used Cayman Islands funds, just by reading the newspapers. Moreover, the term "tax haven" was switched to the katakana English "tax heaven" rather than "tax haven," which is a pure case of judging by sound, a distinctly Japanese trait (ugh). Because of this, I, who work with offshore as my vocation, am always treated as a suspicious person. It’s reputational damage.

Incidentally, the fraudsters mainly swindled domestically, and offshore folks were reportedly not the primary target, but the media didn’t cover it thoroughly, nor did they issue corrections to past reports, which has been a terribly unfair treatment.

That said, rather than relying on unreliable mass media, I believe the most important thing is to communicate properly and earn understanding directly, suppressing anger and other emotions,My blogand I’ve been introducing it here and there, and I’ve been invited to publish a series here as well; for this first installment, I’ve summarized it as follows.

As a token of my business card, would you be interested?

What exactly is "offshore"?