Comment by Chris2048
4 years ago
You are allowed to start companies in other countries, and thereby avoid local laws, without moving i.e. changing you country of residence.
If you believe any different, please say why so. Just "wouldn’t do them any good" is pretty meaningless.
I assumed it was pretty clear why it wouldn’t do them any good:
All of their executives and their staff are in Sweden. It doesn’t matter if the company is registered on Mars, the Swedish government can come knock on their doors, because Swedish laws apply to people in Sweden.
The most mundane way to demonstrate this is to imagine they don’t register a company at all. If a bunch of Swedish people get together and start doing business w/o registering a company, it’s clear that Swedish law applies to them. Why would filing some paperwork with a foreign entity grant them immunity from the laws in the country they live and work from?
A server in Sweden cannot easily be raided by the Swedish, is the first reason.
The second reason is "Swedish laws apply to people in Sweden" seem to make assumptions about what the government can force people to do, or specifically, punish people for not doing. In many cases, authorities just threaten/raid the data-centers so never have to bother take that route.
Lastly, I'm not sure this is true: "Swedish laws apply to people in Sweden" - I'm not sure this applies to Swedes working for foreign corps, there are a whole load of laws that apply to local corps only. In fact, that are laws that apply to Swedish corps even when their staff reside abroad - unless "government can come knock on their doors" is a reference to physical coercion.
This isn’t really responsive to what I’m saying or what you asked me.
I didn’t make any assumptions about what Swedish law can or cannot do. Swedish laws apply to people in Sweden. If Swedish law says that you can’t use Helvetica font on your website, and the punishment is 10 years of hand-tracing a better font on stone tablets, then they’re able to apply that law to a Sweden-based web developer, regardless of whether or not he works for a company that’s registered in Spain.
Likewise, yes, the Swedish government surely has many laws with carve outs for different use cases. Taxes are a great example here: there are laws that apply only to activities of foreign corporations, and laws that apply only to local corporations. But the Swedish government gets to make those laws and determine which apply to whom. Likewise, you are correct that Sweden can make laws that apply to Swedish corporations even when their staff reside abroad. This is because by registering in Sweden, the business has given the Swedish government a measure of control over their activities.
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> It doesn’t matter if the company is registered on Mars, the Swedish government can come knock on their doors, because Swedish laws apply to people in Sweden.
But it does matter. In most EU countries limited-liability companies (like the Swedish Aktiebolag) are legal entities that are completely separate from their owners and employees. Your idea of Swedish authorities "knocking" on people's doors (who own a company registered abroad) and "convincing" them to hand over customer data appears to be more along to lines of https://xkcd.com/538/ but in this case (in the particular case of a country like Sweden that has a well-respected legal system) it doesn't seem to be grounded in reality.
For instance, Swedish law likely compells companies to hand over customer data under certain circumstances. But if you're the "just" the owner of that (limited-liability) company, the company's customers are not your customers, so authorities cannot compell you to give them access to those customers' data (because you are a separate legal entity).
Your theory is an American could start a company that violates US laws so long as they form the entity somewhere else?
Depends what you mean. US law takes into account the existence of foreign nations already; some explicitly end at the borders, others not so.
It also depends on which country, and to what extent agreements exist between those countries wrt policing their own territories. Those that don't have such agreements, are often also limited in what extent they can do business in the US.
GP didn't say anything like that. They were talking about
> avoid[ing] local laws
(i.e. legally) which is a whole different matter.
How is that different from saying Swedes can avoid Swedish law by incorporating somewhere else?
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Completely false.