The material in the Master Guides, the Fact Finders, and the IOFC Chapters derives primarily from my notes created for academic and training courses which I have given during the past three decades to business students, attorneys, auditors, accountants, and financial planners in

Amsterdam • Atlanta • Baltimore • Boston • Brussels • Cape Town • Chicago • Dallas • Denver • Durban • Edinburgh • Frankfurt • Geneva • Hong Kong • Houston • Johannesburg • Kuala Lumpur • Lisbon • London • Los Angeles • Madrid • Manchester • Melbourne • Miami • Milan • Minneapolis-St Paul • New Orleans • New York • Oklahoma City • Paris • Perth • Phoenix • Reno • San Diego • San Francisco • Seattle • Singapore • Sydney • Tulsa • Washington • Zurich

as well as from my researches in the business programs which I have taught at the following universities and institutions

• Jesse Jones School of Administration, Rice University, Houston, Texas
• Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) School of Management, Paris
• Offshore Institute courses on offshore trusts, taught at Jesus College, Oxford
• University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
• Institute of Advanced Studies, Johannesburg, South Africa

Additionally, invaluable input came from in-house counsel of clients, including multinational corporations and financial institutions, and in particular Revenue departments, government agencies and international bodies. Indeed, much of the hands-on material and information contained in this website could have come from nowhere else.

For the methodology and presentation in the website I am deeply indebted to the following persons:

First and foremost, my measureless gratitude is owing to Lord McNair, President of the International Court of Justice, and to Ambassador van Kleffens, ambassador of the European Coal and Steel Community in London, for the incomparable formation with which they endowed me at the start of my professional career, when they retained me for 10 years to prepare the General Index to 125 volumes of the Recueil des Cours of the Hague Academy of International Law.

Deep thanks too go to the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation in Amsterdam, which retained me as Consultant to the Bureau and Editor of European Taxation. The Head of the Bureau, J van Hoorn Jr, and his team of experts flew me through all the hoops of editing texts of international and comparative fiscal law.

Next in line was John Jeffrey-Cook, senior tax editor of Butterworths in London, who first ran with my little work on International Tax Planning to the Financial Times Book of the Month, and then retained me to design for Butterworths the Spitz Tax Havens Encyclopedia, now, under its new name Offshore Service, in its 90th issue.

Sid Bernstein of Harcourt Professional Publishing in San Diego, guided me in the shaping of a major work which he titled International Tax Havens Guide – The Professional’s Source for Offshore Investment Information. After a number of successful annual editions, Harcourts sold the work to Aspen Publishers in New York, which brought out an even bigger edition of the work, and then kindly gave me copyright.

No one can possibly produce an encyclopedic website of this nature without the help of top experts worldwide. My special thanks are due to:

Barry Adams, Roger Bray, Charles A Cain, Matthew C Cain, John Chown, Piers Coke-Wallis, Willie Comello, John Dewhurst, Gerrit Disbergen, J Richard Duke, Barry Engel, John R Garland, Stephen Gray, Milton Grundy, Nathalie Jones (Coke-Wallis), Cym H Lowell, Mike Maskall, Christo W Meyer, David Morkel, Paul E W Roper, Daniel L Saksenberg, and Dick van Waardenburg.

A royalty is permanently given to charities collectively in all of their names.

Barry Spitz