Advice please on country/company formation with several EMI options

[visorak]

First time poster

Offshore is completely new to us so please excuse the complete Noobness of this post.

Situation:
3 business partners:
1 US Citizen (Partner A)
1 US Citizen (Partner B) (has a NL BV(LLC) established as a sole proprietor and is working on immigrating to NL using this BV)
1 NL Citizen (Partner C) with a Dutch BV(LLC).

We are looking at starting a streaming media business with copyrighted material and we want to do like most in this type of business: limit tax and most importantly protect against copyright issues from directly falling on us personally. This business would need to accept Electronic payments.

Our thoughts:

• Establish an offshore company in a country that has several EMI options with low cost of incorporation (We're just starting out so not a lot of money here).
• Offshore company would pay for all services needed to run the business (servers, etc) so it has to be in a location where the vendors would be willing to work with the offshore. Vendors would be mainly in the US and EU. Offshore would need to have debit/credit cards to pay for vendor services.
• Partner A would start a Delaware LLC as a sole proprietor as he does not have one today and use this to do B2B invoicing of the offshore company and he would personally be paid through this Delaware LLC.
• Partner B and C would use their NL LLCs as the same as partner A..B2B invoicing of the offshore and be personally be paid through the NL LLCs.
• Partner Bs NL residency depends on income coming in from his LLC so it's important that the government sees money coming through this.

We want the most EMI options because we understand that establishing an offshore company without first researching EMI options is the wrong way to go. It should be EMI->Offshore location.

Does this above situation make sense and if so where should we look at establishing the offshore company?

If you look at this post and just laugh because we're all idiots then I can accept that. Everyone has to start somewhere and we're at the very beginning. At least we are doing research BEFORE starting down a path and wasting money.

I hope to remain active in the community as we move through this and keep the gold subscription as I think the information and advice is very valuable.

Thank you!

Last edited: Jul 3, 2020

 

[visorak]

Any advice?

 

[anotherone]

it is really complicated.
Usually big companies use two headquarter, one in the US, one in EU.
We can't trade using offshore. So forget BVI, Panama and seychelles. No EMI will accept a corporate account from an offshore company.
In EU, if you open a coporate EMI account at Quppy to get an IBAN, you can use a company based anywhere in Europe. The location are not important. For instance, you can use a bulgarian company with an estonian company.
Usually people choose the netherlands because they get the best server location for european market. Servers help to enforce the presence of a company in a country.
Then, you could use a BVI company with all the intellectual properties of your business (code, domain name, marketing), and from the BVI to can distribute to your biz partner. Between the trading ducth company would deposit money in the BVI company.

 

[GAC Limited]

@visorak, It is not as complicated as it may seem. You are asking a lot of good questions and have an open mind which is great. As a US resident as well, I would NEVER set up anything as a sole proprietor, the tax burden falls on that individual person with no real corporate protection. Protection is key in your type of business especially with two American partners. You can form companies in tax friendly jurisdictions and take advantage of the UK's tax friendly policies on income earned for said foreign nationals. Also, when trying to accept electronic payments you will have to make sure you are meeting all legal components regarding authorizations to sell streaming services (licensing) otherwise, you will end up paying high processing rates via "unique" payment providers. Sorry to not be specific but I am in this line of business so being too specific will not be conducive to staying in business. LOL. Feel free to PM me and I will be happy to get into specifics with you but I will also answer questions here in more general terms.

 

[Min Park]

You will need to use donkey for front shop to collect money.
And you and your partners will provider services to donkey company like hosting/programming/support/marketing.