He died in 2019.īret Afdahl, director of the South Dakota Division of Banking, said trust companies are required to confirm the identities of all customers and that foreign clients and assets receive additional scrutiny. “Nobody understands any of them,” Gene Abdallah, Republican chairman of South Dakota’s Senate Judiciary Committee, quipped at a legislative session in 2007. With little opposition, state legislators turned the proposals into laws – dozens since the late 1990s. The industry’s rapid expansion was led by a group of trust company insiders, who year after year pitched legislative proposals that were highly appealing to customers in the United States and abroad: protecting trusts from creditors, from taxing authorities, from foreign governments. One of the largest trust companies in the state, the South Dakota Trust Company, boasts a roster of international clients from 54 countries. In South Dakota, assets in trusts more than quadrupled over the past decade to $360 billion. Other states competing to lure wealth include Alaska, Delaware, Nevada and New Hampshire. Image: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post An aerial view of a building in the heart of downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota that houses Trident Trust Co. The company declined to answer questions about its clients. In a written statement, Trident said it is committed to compliance with all applicable regulations and routinely cooperates with authorities. The trust documents come mostly from the Sioux Falls office of Trident Trust, a global provider of offshore services. The cache of confidential files, obtained by ICIJ and shared with more than 150 media partners, describe only some of the trusts in the United States but is the most significant set of records ever made public from inside America’s trust industry. Nearly 30 of the trusts held assets connected to people or companies accused of fraud, bribery or human rights abuses in some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. The investigation identified 206 U.S.-based trusts linked to 41 countries holding combined assets worth more than $1 billion. The records, known as the Pandora Papers, expose how foreign political and corporate leaders or their family members moved money and other assets from long-established tax havens to U.S. The Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) gained an unprecedented look into the money flowing into trusts in the United States by examining a trove of more than 11.9 million confidential documents maintained by trust and corporate services providers around the world. That shield, which is near-absolute, has insulated the industry from meaningful oversight and allowed it to forge new footholds in U.S. The investigation identified 206 U.S.-based trusts holding combined assets worth more than $1 billion, including nearly 30 trusts that held assets linked to people or companies accused of fraud, bribery or human rights abusesīut a burgeoning American trust industry is increasingly sheltering the assets of international millionaires and billionaires by promising levels of protection and secrecy that rival or surpass those offered in overseas tax havens. government has long condemned prominent offshore financial centers, where liberal rules and guarantees of discretion have drawn oligarchs, business tycoons and politicians. The company called it: “The South Dakota Advantage.”Īmong those who answered the call: A Colombian textile magnate caught in a scheme to launder the proceeds of an international drug ring, an orange juice mogul who settled with authorities in Brazil for allegedly colluding to underpay local farmers and family members of the former president of a sugar producer in the Dominican Republic that has been accused of exploiting laborers and forcibly evicting families from their homes. Trident Trust promised to protect the fortunes and privacy of its new customers by relying on the laws of a state that had become a global destination for wealth. SIOUX FALLS, SD: Across from a Holiday Inn, in a red-brick building with a welcome sign that reads “The Heart of America,” a little-known financial firm set up shop seven years ago and extended an invitation to the world’s elite.

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