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You don’t live in the UAE — but your assets do. For non-residents with UAE property, investments, or business holdings, succession is the challenge that few people plan for and everyone eventually faces. You may have left the UAE years ago. Or perhaps you never lived there at all, but acquired a property during the real estate boom, or maintained a brokerage account from your years in Dubai, or still hold a stake in a business headquartered in a free zone. The UAE remains a globally attractive destination for capital, and it is entirely common for individuals who are tax resident elsewhere to maintain meaningful assets within its borders. What is less commonly understood is the succession risk this creates.

The UAE’s tax-free environment is real and valuable — for now. The structuring decision you make before you leave will define your wealth for decades. There is a moment in every internationally mobile client’s life in Dubai when the conversation changes. It usually starts with a holiday to Barcelona, or a child who has started school in London, or a business opportunity in Frankfurt. And it ends with a question that no one in the UAE is asking loudly enough: what happens to my assets when I leave? The answer, for the unprepared, is expensive. A UAE resident who relocates to Spain, France, or Germany without structuring in place faces European tax rates — as high as 30–47% — on

You do not need to live in Switzerland to benefit from Swiss private banking. But if your money is there and your tax position is unstructured, you may be leaving significant efficiency on the table. Switzerland still holds more offshore private wealth than any other country in the world. Zurich and Geneva remain the default addresses for the kind of discreet, highly personalised private banking that HNWI clients with complex international profiles require. For many of these clients, Switzerland is not where they live — it is where their money is. But location of assets and location of tax exposure are not the same thing. A client resident in Dubai, Hong Kong, or London holding CHF 15 million with a

For the right kind of high-net-worth client, Switzerland offers a PPLI planning environment unlike anywhere else in Europe. Here is why — and who it is for. Walk into any private banking conference in Geneva or Zurich and you will hear two received wisdoms about Switzerland and investment tax. The first: Switzerland has no capital gains tax. The second: Switzerland is an expensive place to be a taxpayer. Both are true, and understanding why they coexist — and how a specific structure makes them irrelevant simultaneously — is the key to unlocking Switzerland as a PPLI jurisdiction. The No-CGT Baseline — and Its Limitations Switzerland does not tax capital gains realised by private investors on securities portfolios. This is a

You bought the Algarve villa for the lifestyle. The warmth, the coast, the golf course ten minutes away. At the time, the last thing on your mind was Portuguese inheritance law. It probably still is. Most non-resident property owners in Portugal give very little thought to what happens to the villa on death – until an adviser, a solicitor, or a family conversation forces the question. And when it does, the answer is often a surprise. The Inheritance Tax Portugal Does Not Have – and the One It Does Portugal abolished inheritance and gift tax for direct family members years ago. If you leave your Portuguese property to your children or your spouse, they inherit free of any Portuguese inheritance

If you moved to Portugal under the Non-Habitual Resident regime, or advised someone who did, you already know: NHR is gone. The Portuguese government closed the scheme to new applicants at the end of 2024. For those whose ten-year period has expired, there is nothing to replace it. The full IRS progressive scale — up to 48% — now applies. The new IFICI regime is not NHR in a different coat. It is a targeted incentive for qualifying tech workers, researchers, and specific investors. It is not available to retirees, passive investors, or most of the expat community that Portugal has attracted over the past decade. Advisers who present IFICI as a like-for-like replacement risk seriously misleading clients. So where

Your clients don’t live in Germany. They live in Dubai, London, Vienna, Singapore. They might never have set foot in a German tax office. And yet German inheritance tax could reach across borders and take up to 50% of what they leave behind. Here is why — and what PPLI can do about it. The Extraterritorial Reach of German Inheritance Tax Most advisers think of Germany as a market for German residents. That is understandable but incomplete. The German Erbschaft- und Schenkungsteuergesetz (ErbStG — Inheritance and Gift Tax Act) has extraterritorial reach in two ways that directly affect non-resident clients. First, German inheritance tax applies to the worldwide estate of any individual who was German-domiciled or German-resident at the time