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How French residents are using offshore Private Placement Life Insurance to eliminate the annual 31.4% tax drag, plan their estates, and protect crypto wealth — legally and transparently. Updated for 2026. French tax law moved after this article was first published. The flat tax on directly held portfolios is now 31.4%, life insurance was expressly excluded from the increase, and a new minimum-rate contribution (the CDHR) can affect large policy surrenders. The current position is set out in full in France Raised the Flat Tax to 31.4%. Assurance Vie Was Left Out. If you live in France and hold a meaningful investment portfolio, the French tax system has a simple answer to most of your decisions: sell shares — 31.4%.

For non-residents who own property, investments, or other assets in Spain. Your client does not live in Spain, but maybe they lived there in the past, visit regularly, or own a property on the coast that they bought as an investment or a holiday home. They may have a brokerage account holding Spanish equities, or a Spanish-situs bond portfolio. Perhaps they moved on — to London, to Dubai, to Geneva — and Spain is somewhere in the background of their financial life rather than its centre. But Spain has not moved on from them and their assets. Spanish-situs assets — property, shares in Spanish companies, certain financial instruments with a Spanish connection — attract Spanish tax on capital gains, Spanish

For wealth advisers with Spanish-resident clients — and those with clients planning to relocate. Your client moved to Spain, or has lived there for years. They have built a portfolio – equities, funds, some cryptocurrency, perhaps a bond ladder. And every year, without fail, the Spanish tax authority takes its share. Dividends received: taxed. Capital gain on a fund switch: taxed. One cryptocurrency swapped for another: taxed. Each event is a separate charge, a separate calculation, a reduction in the capital that is supposed to be compounding. From 2026, Spain introduced a new 30% rate on savings income above EUR 300,000 per year. That is the headline number. But even before reaching EUR 300,000, the standard rates are 19%, 21%,

The previous two pieces in this series established the UK tax baseline for life insurance payouts and the mechanics of trust structures that remove a policy from the policyholder’s estate for Inheritance Tax purposes. This third piece addresses a question that arises directly from that analysis: when the life company itself authors the trust structure — as is standard practice across the offshore PPLI market — does that structure hold, and what are the UK IHT implications across the major PPLI jurisdictions beyond the Crown dependencies? THIS SERIESPart 1 – Are Life Insurance Payouts Tax-Free in the UK?Part 2 – Writing Life Insurance in Trust: How the Structure Works and What Changed in April 2025Part 3 – Offshore PPLI and