Societăți offshore – limita dintre legalitate și eludarea prevederilor fiscale
Offshore companies – the line between legality and tax avoidance

Summary/Abstract: Taxation should represent for individuals a guarantee of the proper functioning of society, but since ancient times, individuals have sought to evade the tax authorities responsible for collecting taxes, seeking to maximize their wealth without paying the specific taxes that should go to the state budget. Offshore companies appear in this context as a dual instrument, a lever that can be used either to relieve part of the tax burden (a burden that will always be considered excessive by taxpayers, as there is a belief that the state is unable or, worse, unwilling to do anything other than enrich itself and its representatives, without providing anything in return to ordinary citizens), or for a veritable departure from the straight and narrow, but arduous, path of taxation. From an etymological point of view, in the Explanatory Dictionary of the Romanian Language, the term offshore has as its primary meaning money invested in another country. This paper aims to provide some guidelines on how to determine the purpose for which money is invested in an offshore company: for the valid and worthy purpose of expanding a business or in bad faith, thus seeking to defy mandatory rules and timidly or boldly, as the case may be, entering the realm of illegality. The legal mechanisms promoted through offshore companies are considered harmful because they are often characterized by a severe lack of transparency. The obscurity of the operations undertaken and the popular conception that some territories, more or less exotic, are a space conducive to fraud make offshore companies a taboo subject, but one with many facets to explore and with a specific character. Each case requires a case-by-case analysis, in which the application of the law must be made with consideration of the facts in their entirety, however thorny they may be, and with close attention to details that aim to formulate objective and unequivocal answers to questions that categorically involve subjective aspects. It must thus be determined whether the intention was to circumvent tax provisions or whether the business operates through the off shore company in accordance with both the spirit and the letter of the law; whether the ingenuity of the constructions is part of a fair business strategy or stems from a corrupt mentality; whether, ultimately, offshore companies are on the side of abuse of law as a means of making a profit.

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