Colin Davison is joined by offshore tax expert, Graham Arnott to look at going 'down under' for some particularly canny tax planning...

Using the internet as a search tool for tax planning can prove very effective but not even the world wide web has caught on to a little known, but highly lucrative, form of offshore tax planning.

New Zealand wouldn't be the first country you'd think of when investigating offshore tax planning and if you surfed the web or contacted offshore structuring consultants you'd be very fortunate to find anything on using New Zealand as part of your tax planning.

A search on Google raises some 4.6 million links on offshore tax planning and offshore structuring but there are no links or references to New Zealand on the first five pages at all.

And yet New Zealand Offshore Trusts (NZOTs) are an excellent way of owning assets and increasing wealth without accruing the tax burden that normally goes with it in other high-tax jurisdictions of Europe and America.