took place in 1997.
In the run up to 1997, many of Hong Kong's wealth-owning families began restructuring their businesses in view of perceived political risks and sought second (and third and fourth) citizenships and places of alternative residence. My work changed from being work for companies on their tax affairs to work for the owners of companies looking more comprehensively at their situation, mixing in issues of political risk and asset protection with tax exposures in the USA and elsewhere particularly those associated with cross-border investment and new residences and citizenships. Many of the wealth owners in Hong Kong came from families who had fled China on the arrival of the communists and who suffered the expropriation of their businesses and many other similar setbacks and challenges. They were not about to let themselves lose everything again.
My work with families in relation to their personal and business assets, and the protection of wealth, led to me working with the wealth-management industry – the providers of asset-management services, trusts, and other “tools” of wealth planning. Something I learned early on is that the industry all too often does not meet the comprehensive needs of the clients it serves. This led to me becoming active in training and education within the industry, and working on strategy for private banks and others interested in greater alignment with the needs of their clients. But overall, I was working in a major growth industry that was – to me – surprisingly chaotic (and often unethical) in its management and delivery of services.
In the mid-1990s, I moved to Switzerland, where I spent 15 years working with private banks, trust and insurance companies, and the global families that use their services. With young children, we were looking for a clean place to live in light of the growing pollution in Hong Kong. A partner of an international law firm, I had the opportunity to look at a map and broadly choose where I wanted to spend the next years of my career. We arrived in Zurich, and found the clean place we were looking for – air that was broadly unpolluted, a lake that could be swum in, and a population surprisingly obsessed with cleanliness. One of our many challenges in adapting to Switzerland related to the complexities of throwing out garbage, navigating a system that combined charges for unsorted waste and the encouragement of free recycling.
But while Zurich and Switzerland were certainly clean places, this was pretty much only from the point of view of the environment. While I was not naïve when arriving in Switzerland, I was still shocked at the unclean nature of the Swiss financial center and, in particular, its wealth-management industry. Now forced to change, the Swiss were, to me, clearly abusing their role as global champions of privacy, ignoring the real needs of their clients, which in my view include ensuring that families “play by the rules” of their home countries of residence and investment – including the tax rules of those countries. While tax evasion is a global problem, and the role of the wealth-management industry in facilitating tax evasion is and was by no means limited to Switzerland, I believe that Switzerland, as the dominant player in the wealth-management industry, had the opportunity to take leadership in addressing the issue. Instead, Switzerland and many other offshore banking centers misled their clients into believing that secrecy could be the solution to all problems.
Today, things are changing. Not only in Switzerland, where tax compliance and transparency are at the top of the agenda in the wealth-management industry, but around the world. Data leaks, most recently in Panama, have contributed to change, but the shift from an opaque world to one that is increasingly transparent will take time, and the road for many wealth owners will be a rocky one. Switzerland failed to take the global lead it could have on the issues of undeclared money, and today there remain, surprisingly, financial centers that continue to mislead families into thinking that hiding money is good financial planning. The USA is a particularly egregious offender, particularly given the way it has sought to protect its own tax revenues through aggressive attacks on Switzerland and others, while preserving the ability of its banks and corporate service providers to market secrecy over substance.
To compound these problems, in my experience, too many families have failed to understand their own planning needs and the conflicts of interest their advisors and banks have. Many of the families I have come across have neglected to focus on the critical issue of succession – in part due to an obsession with secrecy and an over-emphasis on tax exposures. Tax enforcement is a new reality, with many developments that are quickly changing the ways of the past. Notwithstanding these changes, I continue to have a real concern that families do not put enough emphasis on the key question or issue that they need to address – will wealth destroy their family?
In the 1980s a common line of thinking among my clients and friends was that things were different for Chinese families. I was told that I did not understand that the Chinese were close and loving families, where succession would never be something that would have a detrimental impact on family and relationships. This was in direct contrast to litigious Westerners lacking the respect for the older generation that the Chinese were innately meant to have. I later ran across Latin American families professing similar beliefs, this time on a theme of love and devotion (and music) that made them different. The sad reality, proven over and over by the many disastrous fights among Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and other families of late, is that all families are the same – the children, holding hands, arrive at their parents’ home for dinners and lunches, and after the passing of their parents all too often end up enriching the lawyers who are all too often happy to fuel the flames in disputes over murky succession arrangements left by the older generation.
There is no question that religious and cultural issues impact how families work as well as the successionprocess itself. But no family is immune to the dangers that wealth can generate, or the relatively new issues associated with all of us living longer and the succession changes that result because of changes in the demographic patterns. If Mom or Dad lives to 105, does that mean that I inherit when I am 80? And what of the growing incidence of dementia and all the problems that come with it?
Are these only problems of the “wealthy?” For me, the answer is no – all wealth owners, meaning anyone who owns anything of value that may pass to the next generation or to others, have the potential to destroy their families through a poorly planned or ambiguous succession process. In fact, families who have relatively little in the way of assets have a particular responsibility to ensure that what they have and hope to use to enhance the lives of the next generation does not end up in the wrong hands or result in the destruction of family relationships.
Who really is wealthy is, in any case, a very subjective thing – what is a fortune to one person may be a pittance to another. And there is a sad reality that human nature seems to make people think they always need more than they have to really be “rich.” In the end, we do need money to survive, but how much is ever enough? Does wealth really create happiness? Or does it too often result in deep unhappiness and regret?
Perhaps the comedian Spike Milligan was right in saying money can't buy you happiness… but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery. I actually think that he was too optimistic.
Acknowledgments
I have many to thank for help in writing this book, and have to acknowledge the outstanding support I received from a number of friends and colleagues. A surprising number of people took the time to read an advance review copy of the book, and I received many, many helpful comments.
The errors and judgements that I have made are, of course, my own responsibility, and I take particular ownership of the strong negative views I have of certain financial centers and of those who have led the wealth-management industry and its clients down a dark, dangerous path more about secrecy than understanding and meeting client needs. I believe that wealth-owning families have been let down by a business which has been too easily distracted by short-term, easy profits. These views are my own, and I take full responsibility for them.
I was fortunate in my career to have had the opportunity to work with families from around the world and, in my teaching, with students from around the world. I learned much from these
