Overseas trade

Please read my words about Overseas Work because this directly affects the possibilities for overseas trade.

The best instant advice I can give is that "foreign" means  "alien in character, remote, strange or unfamiliar", amongst other dictionary definitions. Having lived "overseas" for ten years I can say from direct continuing experience that any assumption one makes about anything, will be flat wrong. And one thing it will not by like is British. Foreign MEANS foreign. Alien. Whatever you expect, it won't be. All this means you need a guide. There is another way, which is to d.i.y. and learn by your mistakes, but even that path needs you to know how to step by step with least risk - or at least without making a complete hash of it. This takes massive amounts of time. No one will tell you unless you ask, and when you do, you have to ask exactly the right question of exactly the right department person - and you will mostly likely have to do it in a language that is not English.

Google "offshore company formation". All of it is selling "productised services*". None of it tells you what you need to know about your own circumstances. "Innocents abroad" springs to mind.

It's not so much about anything much "out there" being wrong as it is about being incomplete, but that incompleteness is about your circumstances and no one can write their web site taking that in to account, because there are as many circumstances as there are people - and indeed you can plan your circumstances to suit, as along as you then live them too. Planning circumstances and then living something else... "here be dragons".

You cannot buy a foreign company and run it from the UK expecting to not pay UK tax. Paying someone else to (pretend) run it does not work either and is still deeper water.

Can I help with this? Maybe, you will not now be surprised to hear that it depends. Call me for a brief discussion; if you want a second opinion I can also do that.

* I have no connection whatever with the link above to "productise"; I am using it to show how the world is going - and wondering if I should be doing that too. As to the word "productise"? I don't like it, but it is already in use and has meaning.