Nevis trust or Nevis foundation: the same fortress, two ways to hold your wealth

Nevis sits near the top of every serious asset protection list, and for good reason. The small Caribbean island, part of the Federation of St Kitts and Nevis, has spent three decades building some of the most creditor-resistant statutes anywhere. It offers two different vehicles to use them: the Nevis International Exempt Trust and the Nevis Multiform Foundation. The choice between them matters more than most providers admit.

One point comes first, because everything else depends on it. As long as you live in a high-tax country, a Nevis structure will not lower your tax bill in any legal way. It can protect your assets from a lawsuit. It does not protect your income from your own tax authority. Those are two different problems. Confusing them is how otherwise careful people end up with an elegant offshore structure, a full tax bill and a pile of disclosure forms.

What follows is what each vehicle is, where they differ, who should consider which, and the part that rarely makes it into a brochure.

What both vehicles share

Both rest on Nevis law that was written to make life hard for a foreign creditor. A creditor who already holds a judgment against you elsewhere, from an English High Court, a Dutch court or a US court, cannot simply enforce it in Nevis.

Foreign judgments are not enforced. The trust ordinance states that no proceedings to enforce or recognise a judgment from another jurisdiction against an international trust, its settlor, trustee, protector, beneficiaries or property will be entertained. The foundation ordinance contains a parallel rule for judgments based on law inconsistent with it. The Nevis regulator puts it plainly for trusts: any civil action to recover assets must be brought anew in the courts of St Kitts and Nevis.

Three further features do most of the work, as set out in the revised edition of the law published by the Nevis Financial Services Regulatory Commission:

• A bond before the creditor may sue. Under section 61 of the Nevis International Exempt Trust Ordinance, a creditor must first deposit a bond of 270,000 Eastern Caribbean dollars from a financial institution in Nevis, to secure the costs if the action fails. For a foundation, section 83 of the Multiform Foundations Ordinance sets the bond at 50,000 dollars.
• The criminal standard of proof. A creditor who wants to reach assets transferred into the structure must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the transfer was made with the principal intent to defraud that creditor and left the settlor or founder unable to pay.
• A short clock. A transfer into a trust is not fraudulent against a creditor if it was made more than one year after that creditor's cause of action accrued, or before it accrued at all. The foundation ordinance has the same one-year rule, and adds that a creditor who does not sue within six months of an earlier subscription loses the argument too. The clock runs from the act or omission behind the claim, not from the day the creditor discovers the transfer.

On top of this, the trust ordinance bars any injunction or order whose purpose is to detain, garnish, attach or otherwise interfere with trust property, wherever it is situated.

So both vehicles stand inside the same fortress, with some differences in the masonry. The real question is what you want living inside it.

The Nevis International Exempt Trust

A trust is not a thing; it is a relationship. You, the settlor, hand legal ownership of assets to a trustee, who holds and manages them under a deed for the benefit of your beneficiaries. To register an international trust in Nevis, one trustee must be a Nevis corporation or a trust company doing business in Nevis. You can add a protector, whom the ordinance allows to direct the trustee to make and approve distributions or to make particular investments. That is how a settlor keeps a hand on the wheel without legally owning anything a creditor can seize.

Strengths of the trust route:

• Depth of practice. The trust is the original Nevis vehicle, in force since 1994 and substantially amended in 2015.
• Privacy in court. Non-criminal proceedings about an international trust are heard in private, and no details may be published without the court's leave.
• Familiarity for common-law readers. If you grew up with English or Irish law, the trust is an intuitive concept.

The limit is conceptual rather than legal. A trust depends on the fiduciary discretion of a trustee: you rely on a person or company to do the job. For many people that is fine. For entrepreneurs who want control, and for readers from civil-law countries where trusts are an unfamiliar concept, it can be uncomfortable.

On this site the trust is a structure for people who are moving abroad. We consider it only when a move is actually planned, and we say so in the first conversation. The same applies to our Asset Protection Trust in Wyoming.

The Nevis Multiform Foundation

This is the more modern vehicle. Created under the Multiform Foundations Ordinance 2004, a registered Nevis foundation is, in the words of the ordinance, a separate and independent legal entity in its own right, capable of suing and being sued in its own name. It owns its assets itself. There are no shareholders.

You are the founder; the ordinance calls you the subscriber. A management board runs the foundation, the ordinance also provides for a supervisory board, and beneficiaries receive what the constitution provides. The foundation does not even need a beneficiary. Its by-laws are confidential and are not open to public inspection on the register unless the foundation chooses otherwise.

What makes it distinctive is the word multiform. The foundation states a form, and it can change that form later by amending its constitution. The ordinance is explicit: a change of form does not affect the foundation's existence as a separate legal entity, nor its rights, obligations or pending proceedings. The forms it contemplates include a foundation, a trust, a company and a partnership.

Why this matters for readers from Scandinavia and the Benelux in particular:

• A familiar legal form. Foundations are native to civil-law systems. A reader in Stockholm, Amsterdam or Copenhagen often finds a foundation easier to place in succession planning than a common-law trust.
• Cleaner ownership. Because the foundation is the owner, the question of who owns what is structurally tidier than in the trustee model.
• Commercial purposes are allowed. The ordinance permits charitable or non-charitable, commercial or non-commercial purposes, or a mix.

A foundation can also apply to become tax-resident in Nevis and pay tax at a rate the ordinance caps at one per cent. Otherwise, a foundation that deals only with persons outside Nevis pays no tax in Nevis, and no estate, inheritance, succession or gift tax is charged in Nevis on assets transferred to it. None of this changes your tax position at home, as the next sections show.

Our Nevis foundation page describes the structure as we set it up.

Side by side

The decisive line is not in the table. The protection is of the same kind. You are not choosing between strong and weak. You are choosing between two ways of governing wealth, trustee discretion or corporate personality, filtered through your own legal culture and how much control you want to keep.

The part that rarely makes it into a brochure

If you are tax-resident in a high-tax country, you cannot use a Nevis trust or foundation to lower your tax bill in any lasting, legal way. The protective statutes are real. The tax saving, for a resident of the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia, the Benelux or the United States, does not exist, and chasing it is where legal exposure begins.

The reasons, country by country, all point the same way:

• United Kingdom. The transfer of assets abroad rules (sections 714 to 751 of the Income Tax Act 2007) and the settlements legislation exist to attribute offshore income back to the UK resident who set the structure up. Since 6 April 2025 the old protections for non-resident trusts no longer apply: according to HMRC's helpsheet HS262, a settlor is assessed on the income of the trust and its underlying entities as it arises.
• The Netherlands. Article 2.14a of the Income Tax Act 2001 attributes the assets and income of a separated private fund, which includes a foundation or trust serving a private interest, to the person who set it up, and after death to the heirs. For Dutch income tax the structure is treated as if it were not there.
• Norway. The Tax Act's rules on low-tax countries reach not only companies but any other independent arrangement or pool of assets in a low-tax country that Norwegian taxpayers control and benefit from. Each is taxed on his share of the profit, distributed or not.
• United States. Under the grantor trust rules (sections 671 to 679 of the Internal Revenue Code), a US person who funds a foreign trust is generally treated as its owner and taxed on its income, with Forms 3520 and 3520-A, Form 8938 and the FBAR on top. The IRS sets this out in its foreign trust reporting guidance and warns of significant penalties.

Then the further layers:

• CFC rules. If the structure owns an underlying company, controlled company rules in most high-tax countries pull its passive income onto your personal return. Our page on CFC rules sets out what they reach.
• Where it is managed. A company incorporated abroad is UK-resident if its central management and control is in the UK, a principle HMRC's International Manual still traces to the 1906 De Beers case. Run the structure from your kitchen table in Manchester and you risk making it resident where you sit.
• Automatic reporting. St Kitts and Nevis implemented the Common Reporting Standard by its Act No. 13 of 2016. Financial institutions there collect and report specified account information every year to the Inland Revenue Department for exchange with partner jurisdictions. Your tax office learns of the account. The only question is whether you told it first.

The cost of putting assets in

Before any of that, putting assets into a structure is itself a transfer, and transfers can be taxed. In the UK, a lifetime transfer into most kinds of trust is charged to inheritance tax above the £325,000 threshold, at 20% if the trustees pay, according to HMRC's guidance on trusts and inheritance tax. Recurring charges on the trust's value follow every ten years, and assets that leave the trust can be charged again.

Put it together, entry cost, attribution of income, automatic reporting, and the result is clear: for a resident of a high-tax country, a Nevis structure delivers protection, a compliance burden and possibly a tax charge just to fund it, but not tax efficiency. Anyone promising a "tax-free Nevis structure while you stay at home" is selling a paperwork problem or worse.

Where these structures fit

Three honest uses:

• Protection. If your concern is litigation, a professional liability claim, a difficult divorce or a creditor, Nevis law is among the strongest anywhere. The condition is that you report the structure correctly and accept that it is tax-neutral, not tax-saving. You pay your tax as before; the assets are harder to reach.
• Succession across generations and borders. Both vehicles can govern how wealth passes on. The foundation suits civil-law families who want continuity without the trust concept.
• The move. This is the only route to genuine tax efficiency. The tax advantage of a structure abroad does not come from the structure; it comes from you changing your own tax residence. Move to a country that does not reach into the structure, and the picture changes. Stay, and no amount of Caribbean paperwork changes your liability.

If you stay tax-resident at home, the protective routes we recommend are the foundation-style Limited (Company Limited by Guarantee) in London and, level with it, the Wyoming LLC, together with accounts outside the EU.

Questions we are asked

Is a Nevis trust or foundation illegal? No. Both are legal to own. What is illegal is failing to report them, or using them to hide income from a tax authority that, under the Common Reporting Standard, receives the account data anyway. Structures abroad are legal; income stays taxable where you are resident; we help nobody hide anything.

Does it cost tax just to move assets into the structure? It can. For a UK resident, a lifetime transfer into most trusts is charged to inheritance tax above the threshold. Check the entry cost in your own country before anything moves.

Which suits a reader from Scandinavia or the Benelux? Usually the foundation, because civil-law courts and tax offices are used to legal entities. But the same attribution rules and the same reporting apply. It changes the form, not the tax answer, until you relocate.

Which suits a British or Irish reader? The trust concept is more familiar, but the UK attributes the income of a settlor-interested structure as it arises either way. Choose on protection and governance, and only tie a trust to an actual move.

Can I save tax by setting one up while staying in my high-tax country? No. Protection: yes. Legal tax saving: not while you are resident there. The residence decision comes first.

Choose for the right reason

A Nevis trust and a Nevis Multiform Foundation stand on the same protective base. The trust suits a common-law thinker who is comfortable with trustee discretion and who is planning a move. The foundation suits anyone who wants corporate-style legal personality, civil-law familiarity and a firmer grip as founder, which is why it fits most readers from continental Europe.

These are shields against creditors and frameworks for succession. While you remain in a high-tax country they are not instruments of tax efficiency. Real tax freedom is a residence decision, not a structure decision. Sort the structure if you need protection. If it is the tax bill that keeps you awake, the conversation is about where you live, not about paperwork.