Structures for pooling other people's capital - and for holding your own.

Whose money is it. If you are investing capital raised from other people under a mandate, you need a fund - with a regulated vehicle or a regulated manager, a depositary, an administrator and an auditor. If you are deciding who holds and who benefits from assets you already own, you need a trust or a foundation. Nothing about the two is interchangeable, and the wrong choice is expensive to unwind later.

No. A trust is a legal relationship created by deed, not a licensed product - in Jersey and Cyprus the trust itself is neither registered as a licence nor authorised. What is regulated is the trustee: JFSC-registered trust company business in Jersey, a full fiduciary licence under Guernsey's Fiduciaries Law 2020, MFSA authorisation under Article 43 in Malta, CySEC-regulated fiduciaries in Cyprus, FMA-licensed professional trustees in Liechtenstein.

The vehicles where supervision sits at the manager. A Luxembourg RAIF is not subject to CSSF product approval and a Swiss L-QIF is exempted by law from FINMA authorisation and approval, so in both cases the timetable is set by manager onboarding, service-provider contracting and documentation rather than by an approval queue. Months, in practice, not the year a supervised product can take.

Seychelles publishes it: a private fund costs US$750 to apply and US$1,000 a year, a professional fund US$1,000 and US$1,250, a public fund US$1,500 and US$1,500, with fund administrator licences from US$1,000. It is a licensed vehicle on a regulator's register, and it carries no EU or US passport, which we say before you commit rather than after.

Only to the extent the law allows, and that line matters. Jersey permits reserved powers within what the Law and sound practice support; Cyprus clarified settlor reservations in the 2012 amendment. A trust where the settlor keeps everything is not a trust, and courts and tax authorities treat it accordingly - we draft to the line, not past it.

The BVI VISTA trust under the Virgin Islands Special Trusts Act 2003 was built for exactly this. It holds shares in a BVI Business Company, lets the trustee retain them without regard to whether that is financially advantageous, restricts intervention in the company's management except in circumstances the Act and the instrument define, and lets the trust instrument govern how directors are appointed and removed.

On the licensed routes in Estonia, Austria and Liechtenstein, yes - the AIFMD and UCITS frameworks apply, and an authorised Liechtenstein AIFM passports into the EEA by notification between authorities. Registration below the de minimis thresholds does not carry the passport. Switzerland has none in any form, and neither do the Bahamas, Seychelles or Panama.

Private, not secret. Beneficial ownership of Maltese trusts is recorded in TUBOR, Cyprus maintains a beneficial ownership register of express trusts with the regulator, and a New Zealand foreign trust is known to Inland Revenue in detail, which is precisely why banks and advisers treat it as clean. Structures built for secrecy rather than privacy fail modern review.

The state fee is the smallest part. Budget the manager or AIFM, the depositary where the framework requires one, the administrator and the auditor - plus what the regime prescribes: EUR 1,250,000 of net assets within twenty-four months for a RAIF, EUR 3,000 to apply in Estonia, US$2,750 to US$3,125 a year plus a US$1,250 principal office fee in the Bahamas, US$1,000 to US$1,500 a year in Seychelles.

A foundation is a legal person that owns the assets and is run by a council; a trust is a relationship in which a trustee holds them for beneficiaries. Civil-law families and asset-holding purposes often suit the foundation - Liechtenstein offers the Stiftung and the registered Treuunternehmen alongside its trust, and Panama's private interest foundation is the region's standard holding vehicle. Common-law families and beneficiary-focused planning usually suit the trust.