I think you should consider Nominee risk from a couple of angles to be honest. 1. Is the Nominee safe in terms of disclosure of who they act for and 2. Are they safe in terms of accessing your funds / company etc
1. It is highly unlikely that any Nominee is realistically going to throw themselves under a bus for their client who paid them a few hundred pounds, but you can ensure that Nominees are located in inaccessible parts of the world, make it expensive to approach them and use jurisdictions where they are not forced to submit to laws in other countries and you make life very hard for anyone trying to access them. You can further complicate matters by using a corporate nominee with a physical nominee appointed which means that accessing information in the corporate location needs to occur first followed by trying to access the individuals in their hard to reach location.
2. Many companies use general nominees who offer their services to lots of other companies and are not really known by the incorporation agent. Some, like us have nominees that are only employed by our company, they are staff but exist in hard to reach offshore locations and are considerably more reliable, well known and fully identified individuals, often professionals. All providers of Nominees should be doing regular
KYC checks on their nominees to ensure they remain suitable.
In all cases protection documentation should exist such as undated resignation documents, declaration of trust,
power of attorney etc and you should at all times have the ability to remove the nominees at will without their consent.
The only issue with accounting and law firms as mentioned above is that they often are too heavily regulated and can relatively easily be forced to share information about their client.
As
@Gediminas says, other more complex structures exist to help with
privacy.
