In a significant escalation of its efforts to combat tax evasion, the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has launched a sweeping investigation targeting clients of Trident Trust Group, a prominent offshore services provider. The investigation, authorized by a federal court on December 23, 2024, involves a “John Doe” summons demanding records from Trident Trust’s Manhattan-based affiliate, Nevis Services Limited, and seeks to uncover potentially concealed assets and income by US taxpayers.

The investigation spans nearly a decade, from 2014 to 2023, focusing on Trident Trust’s global operations across notorious tax havens. The IRS’s probe highlights the agency’s intensified crackdown on abusive offshore financial practices.

Founded in the 1980s in the British Virgin Islands, Trident Trust Group has grown to become one of the largest offshore financial service providers. The firm offers an array of services, including the creation of shell companies, trusts, and other structures designed to shield assets from public scrutiny and government taxation. Its client base reportedly includes high-profile individuals such as former Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso, Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, and Israeli mining magnate Dan Gertler. Trident Trust was also prominently featured in the 2021 Pandora Papers, an investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which shed light on the murky world of offshore finance.

The Pandora Papers revealed that Trident Trust’s clients used its services to shuffle large sums of money across the globe, often obscuring ownership and bypassing regulatory oversight. Notable examples include shell companies connected to Russian billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, whose........

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