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Spotlight On...
Trusts & Fiduciary A
SPOTLIGHT ON... Andreas Athinodorou, Aspen Trust Group
“The trust and fiduciary industry in this era of regulation, transparency, anti-terrorism and anti-money laundering is under a magnifying glass. It is an industry that provides a level of protection and an additional level of privacy in a time when talking about privacy is considered to be blasphemous.”
ndreas Athinodorou is a co-founder of Aspen Trust Group and a qualified Chartered Accountant from the UK. Over the last 20 years, Andreas has
built an expertise in international tax planning for corporate and private wealth clients.
Q
What more can you tell us about Aspen Trust Group?
We are a multi-disciplinary team that aims at offering a complete range of services, kind of a one-stop-shop for corporate and private wealth clients. We offer advice, implementation and on- going management of our solutions, in Cyprus and in about 20 other jurisdictions.
The company was created as a spin-off of one of the top 4 accounting firms. We could see that there was a need for a stand-alone service provider that could offer these one-stop-shop solutions, and within the environment of trust and fiduciary business we wanted to provide the level of service that one expects to receive in a private bank or in a top 4 accounting firm.
Our outlook is to offer solid advice and flexible solutions to our clients. So effectively we look at each case with a holistic approach, which is very important for private wealth clients. Because of the fact that the circumstances of each family are completely different it is one of those services in which you cannot really use one size fits all – approach.
What are the different types of Trusts, and how can they be
beneficial?
The key principal behind a Trust is that the minute the settlor places a property into a trust, the legal ownership of the property changes from the settlor to the trustee. The trustee is looking after the property on behalf of the trust. Beyond this basic principle we can develop many variations of trusts, based on the trust deed we choose. The trust deed addresses the questions of: Who is the beneficiary and the protector, if it exists? Who is the settlor? What are the parameters under which the trust will give the benefits of assets of the trust to the beneficiaries? And so forth. So the minute we get the property suitably settled into a trust, we can play with many variables within the type of trust we can have.
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the hands of the trustee. This effectively creates a cut-off point of the ownership of the assets and beyond, it allows the settlor to express his wishes on what the trustee will do with the assets at a future point in time. As a tool this can be used as a protection, in the case of litigation or in the case of a divorce –or anything that potentially could threaten the ownership of the assets. Or it can be used for determining the benefit of enjoying the ownership of the assets. A Trust can be used for tax planning purposes, to defer or properly tax plan the liabilities of the owners of the assets, or the people that enjoy the benefits of the assets. It can be used for planning the use of the benefits across generations, for example, passing the assets properly from one generation to another, or skipping a generation. And it can actually be used as a way insuring that in order to use the assets, certain parameters are met by the beneficiaries.
The main benefit of a Trust arises from the fact that the settlor separates the ownership of the assets from himself or herself and places them in
A Trust can be used for tax planning purposes, to defer or properly tax plan the liabilities of the owners of the assets, or the people that enjoy the benefits of the assets.
Trusts are used mainly by families and private wealth individuals, as opposed to corporate clients. Then again, even companies belong to
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