The ‘Cowboy Cocktail’: How Wyoming became one of the world’s top tax havens – “We never thought about the oligarchs or the dictator’s friends.”

Trust companies in Wyoming now manage at least $31.5 billion in assets, according to the state.

The cocktail and variations of it — consisting of a Wyoming trust and layers of private companies with concealed ownership — allow the world’s wealthy to move and spend money in extraordinary secrecy, protected by some of the strongest privacy laws in the country and, in some cases, without even the cursory oversight performed by regulators in other states.

Millionaires and billionaires around the world have taken note. In recent years, families from India to Italy to Venezuela have abandoned international financial centers for law firms in Wyoming’s ski resorts and mining towns, helping to turn the state into one of the world’s top tax havens.