Derren Joseph's Offshore Trust Cases Don't Hold Up When Fact Checked
Fact-checked entry by entry, no case on Derren Joseph's list shows a properly formed offshore trust defeated on the merits. The URL still says otherwise.
Derren Joseph publishes an article that reaches Google under the headline "Court Cases Against Offshore Trusts," at a URL reading thinking-of-cook-islands-nevis-and-belize-list-of-court-cases-defeating-offshore-trusts. The snippet Google shows beneath it opens "List of Court Cases Defeating Offshore Trusts Derren Joseph," and adds "Reviewed by Derren Joseph."
Fact-checked entry by entry, none of those cases show a properly formed and maintained offshore trust being defeated on the merits. We put that to him privately, in writing, before we said anything publicly, and he published our analysis in full. Several other authors have done less, and it is worth saying so.
What has not changed is the framing a reader meets first. Defeating is his word, it is still in the URL and still in the search result, and it is not what the decisions underneath it establish.
What the list actually gets wrong
No offshore asset protection trust in the case. Chadwick v. Green concerned offshore annuities and a Panamanian bank account. In FTC v. Fortuna Alliance, the FTC's own account of the money it recovered describes $2.8 million "transferred from an offshore bank in Antigua, West Indies" and says nothing about a trust. U.S. v. Plath is a summons-enforcement case: the IRS asked for records of an offshore credit-card account, the taxpayer did not produce the foreign account statements, and the Service moved to enforce. The card had been issued by Leadenhall Trust Company in the Bahamas, and a company with "Trust" in its name is possibly the reason the case reached a list of trust defeats at all.
None of the three turns on whether a foreign trustee could resist a U.S. court, which is the question a list like this is offered to answer.
Real adverse outcomes, decided by conduct rather than by the jurisdiction. Several entries did end badly for the settlor. We are not going to pretend otherwise. But each one traces to TICC, meaning Timing, Illegal, Comply and Control, and not one of them turns on Cook Islands, Nevis or Belize law. Two of them are not even about those jurisdictions: Colburn concerned a Bermudan trust and Eulich a Bahamian one.
In re Colburn, 145 B.R. 851 (Bankr. E.D. Va. 1992), is a Comply failure, and it is not a Cook Islands case at all: the Prince Trust was settled under the laws of Bermuda. The court denied the debtor his discharge under 11 U.S.C. § 727(a)(4)(A), the false-oath provision, because he did not disclose the trust. No foreign trustee refused anything. A debtor who conceals a trust under oath loses his discharge wherever the trust happens to sit, which is a fact about the debtor and not about the jurisdiction.
SEC v. Solow is a Timing and Control failure, and everything that decided it post-dates the jury verdict. Solow signed a $5.2 million mortgage on the Hillsboro Beach residence, and the SEC's own account records that the proceeds funded a certificate of deposit held by a Cook Islands trust for his wife's benefit. He was held in contempt and ordered to report to the U.S. Marshal on 25 January 2010, to be held until he paid. The SEC also brought a separate action against Mrs. Solow for fraudulent transfer and foreclosure of equitable liens. Signing the mortgage that moved the money is the control finding; doing it after the verdict is the timing finding.
Barbee v. Goldstein is a Timing and Control failure, and the trustee's docket is explicit about both. The order in the adversary proceeding is explicit on both counts. On control, it records that Goldstein "created the JG Trust organized under the laws of the Cook Islands," and that although he "was never the Trustee or Protector of the Trust prior to October 2002, he maintained control over the trust; he was the settlor and beneficiary of the income and principal."
On timing, it records a transfer made "on March 21, 2002, while the Colorado action was ongoing and before the JG Trust was terminated." He moved $200,000 to Youbet.com, taking a promissory note and a stock warrant in the trust's favour. The bankruptcy trustee further alleged that Goldstein did not disclose those interests, though that was a contention in the complaint rather than a finding in this order. He was later jailed for refusing a repatriation order and bought his release by paying roughly $586,000, after which his trustee and Protector consented to winding the trust up. That consent is the point, and not in our favour: a settlor who can have his own trust wound up on request held a power that a properly structured trust does not confer.
Eulich v. United States is a Comply failure, and the first thing to say about it is what was never at stake: nobody was trying to take the trust's assets. The proceeding grew out of an IRS document request during an audit, and what the Service wanted was records. Like Colburn, it is also not a Cook Islands, Nevis or Belize case: the Mona Elizabeth Mallion Trust Fund No. 16 was a Bahamian trust, with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Trust Co. (Bahamas) Ltd. as trustee. Eulich did not produce the records, and argued that the trustee owned them and had refused him. Judge Sam A. Lindsay held that asking once and accepting a refusal does not discharge the duty to make "all reasonable efforts to comply," and held him in civil contempt, imposing "a per diem civil fine in the amount of $5,000 per day for the first 30 days," rising to $10,000 per day from the thirty-first. The documents were then produced. In its final order the court assessed the fine only for the twenty-seven days of actual non-compliance, at "$135,000 ($5000 per day for 27 days)", and declared that Eulich "has purged himself of contempt as of September 30, 2004." A dispute about producing paper, in which no creditor ever reached for the corpus, is not evidence that a trust failed.
One case that passes TICC and still cost the settlor money. Riechers v. Riechers, 178 Misc. 2d 170, 679 N.Y.S.2d 233 (Sup. Ct. 1998), aff'd 267 A.D.2d 445 (2d Dep't 1999), deserves precision rather than a slogan. The physician funded the trust before the divorce and disclosed it. The court declined to set it aside, finding it "established for the legitimate purpose of protecting family assets," and held that it had "no jurisdiction over the corpus of the Cook Islands Riechers Family irrevocable trust."
Then it awarded the wife "one-half of the value of the marital assets placed in the Cook Islands Trust by the defendant as of December 1994, to wit: $2,000,000." It could do that because it had personal jurisdiction over the husband, even though it had none over the trust. Clean timing and full disclosure answer a creditor. They do not answer a matrimonial court that can reach the spouse, which is a limit we set out separately in our note on asset protection and divorce.
One entry that takes work to identify, but can be identified. The list includes "D.C. Docket No. 05-00770" with no party names. It is a district-court docket from the Advanced Telecommunication Network litigation against Daniel W. Allen and David D. Allen. We previously wrote that it could not be looked up; that was wrong.
The full entry-by-entry review, with links to the decisions, is at 45FAPT.com.
The bottom line
Across the reported decisions our attorneys have reviewed, we have not found one in which a foreign trust was defeated on the merits where the trust was properly formed, funded before any claim existed, administered by an independent trustee, and left outside the settlor's control. That is a statement about what those decisions say, and nothing more. It is not a guarantee, and it does not predict how any particular matter would be decided.
Blake Harris Law competes in the asset protection field and discloses Blake Harris's interest in Atlas Trust Company.
Sources, so this can be checked without relying on us. The article before our corrections: Internet Archive, 17 March 2026: the full list, no correction section. The article as it stands: Internet Archive, 4 September 2026: the same list with our corrections beneath it. Neither capture is ours.
Frequently asked
Frequently asked questions
Derren Hayden Joseph presents himself as the principal of HTJ Tax, also trading as Advanced American Tax, and publishes tax guidance under those names. In July 2025 he published an article listing roughly thirty court decisions as cases defeating offshore trusts.
Several entries involve no offshore asset protection trust at all: Chadwick v. Green concerned offshore annuities and a Panamanian bank account, the FTC's own account of Fortuna Alliance describes money recovered from an offshore bank in Antigua and mentions no trust, and U.S. v. Plath was a summons-enforcement case over records of an offshore credit-card account issued by Leadenhall Trust Company in the Bahamas. Other entries are real adverse outcomes, but each traces to TICC conduct rather than to the jurisdiction. In re Colburn was a bankruptcy discharge denied for a false oath, and the trust there was Bermudan rather than Cook Islands. Riechers v. Riechers was a divorce in which the court expressly declined jurisdiction over the trust corpus and still awarded the wife $2,000,000 against the husband.
Yes. He published our analysis in full and did not edit it. What has not changed is the URL and the description Google shows, both of which still describe the cases as defeating offshore trusts.
Our review has not identified a single reported decision in which a properly formed, timely funded foreign asset protection trust with an independent trustee - where the settlor was not in control - failed on the merits. That is a bounded statement about the decisions our attorneys have read, not a guarantee and not a prediction about anyone's case.