There are many reasons why someone would set up an offshore company. Sometimes they do it for anonymity or personal safety reasons, sometimes to make it easier to invest in multiple countries, but sometimes, offshore companies are created for more nefarious purposes. The leak even revealed that I owned a few offshore companies that had been set up by Mossack Fonseca. Unlike some of the other companies in the leak, however, mine had been set up for legitimate estate-planning purposes, and were fully disclosed to Western tax and regulatory authorities.
