For instance, the founder of Wonga.com, Errol Damelin holds his shares through Castle Bridge Ventures, a trust based in the British Virgin Islands.
[1] While the family behind the Nando's restaurant chain, the Enthovens, reportedly use trusts in the Channel Islands as part of their financial planning.
[2] Other users of offshore trusts include Sir Ken Morrison, the British supermarket magnate, the Rothermere family who own the Daily Mail group and the late Bruce Gyngell who founded TV-am.
A Discretionary Offshore Trust enables the trustee to decide on the distribution of profits for different classes of beneficiaries.
No offshore jurisdiction yet appears to have made a serious effort to expand upon the flexibility of discretionary trusts in relation to certainty of objects, as expounded in McPhail v Doulton.
This may be because the common law rules are now considered to be sufficiently flexible to make no widening necessary to attract trust business.
Many offshore jurisdictions have also legislated to abolish certain anachronistic common law rules which sometimes cause difficulty for trust planning.