Where to Start: A Map of the wiki.private.law Corpus

The wiki.private.law corpus is built in three layers, and understanding that hierarchy saves more time than any search box. The top layer is the hub: it neither explains nor calculates, it routes — it shows what decisions your situation is made of and in what order to take them. The middle layer is the generic article: it takes apart a construction as such — what tax residence is, how a trust works, how an EMI differs from a bank. The bottom layer is the product page: a specific programme, a specific jurisdiction, a specific licence, with timelines, thresholds and procedure.

The layers differ in genre, not in depth. A hub answers "what is my decision made of", a generic article answers "how does this construction actually work", a product page answers "what exactly do I do and what does it cost". Mixing them is pointless: a hub will not give you a rate, and a product page will not explain why the rate is what it is. The corpus holds over a thousand pages and around forty hubs, and almost any practical task requires passing through all three layers — usually top down, once each.

The mistake most readers make is starting from the bottom. Someone lands from search on a page about a Caribbean programme and decides, without checking that citizenship by investment does not change their tax residence at all. So this index is built as three entrances to the corpus rather than a table of contents: who you are (the profile of your capital and income), what happened (the event that triggered the question) and where you are (the jurisdiction you are already in or heading to). Pick any entrance — the routes converge on the same hubs.

Who you are

Profile matters more than country. Two people with identical capital but a different nature of income — prize money against royalties, dividends against salary — land in different tax constructions even on an identical move. Below are the eight profiles the corpus is built around; choose the one that describes the source of your money, not your passport. If two fit, read both hubs: they do not contradict each other, they cover different parts of one situation.

The athlete. Income is tied to where you perform, not where you live; prize money, sponsorship and image payments are taxed on different logic. Start with the hub athletes-hub: it shows how residence, source of income and place of competition diverge. Visa routes, including extraordinary-ability categories, are in athlete-visas.

The content creator. Platform payouts, royalties and advertising contracts are three different tax objects, and relocation breaks each of them its own way. The hub is creators-hub; the relocation scenario is worked through in creator-relocation, the intellectual-property relief in ip-box.

The investor buying residence. You are buying a status, not a tax regime — two independent decisions, and their coinciding in one country is the exception rather than the rule. The map of programmes is golden-visas, passport programmes are citizenship-by-investment, the comparison of investment forms is investment-migration-models. The link between status and tax is golden-visa-tax-residency.

The business owner. The question is always double: where do you move and where does ownership of the company stay. Moving the owner without rebuilding ownership usually creates a CFC where there was none. Founder routes are business-owner-routes, the ownership structure is holding-structures, the CFC rules are cfc-master-guide.

The family with an inheritance. Succession law does not follow tax law: your country of residence and the country of the asset may apply different rules to the same property. The hub is succession-planning; the trust construction is trust-basics; the banking and infrastructure layer of family capital is family-office and investment-platforms.

The relocant from Russia. Here the order is the reverse of the usual: first the exit from the old residence and its consequences, then the entry into the new one. A skipped first step catches up through reporting and currency rules, not at the border. The hub is russia-hub, the base construction is tax-residency-basics, the preferential regimes of arrival countries are special-tax-regimes.

The holder of crypto capital. Custody, tax and ownership structure are decided separately and in that order; changing residence without revisiting custody usually leaves the assets in the old legal perimeter. The hub is crypto-private-wealth; the licensing landscape for operations is uae-license-map and kazakhstan-crypto-licenses; Asian stablecoin regulation is asia-stablecoin-regimes.

The fintech operator. A licence is not a document but an obligation to keep capital, people and compliance in a specific country, and the cost of that obligation usually exceeds the cost of the application itself. The hub is fintech-hub, the map of regimes is fintech-license-map. Deeper from there: emi-license-lithuania, eu-banking-license-ecb, usa-license-map, msb-license-usa, license-for-rent, digital-dollar-forms.

What happened

The second entrance is by event. It is useful when the question already exists and needs an answer by a specific date: a contract is signed, a bank has refused, a succession file is open, a demand has arrived from the tax authority. The event sets not only the topic but the sequence: some decisions are reversible, some are not, and the order of steps almost always matters more than the choice of jurisdiction. The eight scenarios below cover most enquiries; each leads into the same layer of hubs as the profile entrance, but from the other side.

Moving and changing tax residence. This is an event with two ends: breaking the old connection and creating the new one. Read tax-residency-basics, then special-tax-regimes and taxes. A separate loose end of the move is pension savings, in pensions-relocation.

Selling the business. The rate on exit is determined by where the owning structure sits, not by where the business operates. Start with holding-structures and cfc-master-guide; venture reliefs on the gain are venture-tax-benefits.

Buying property abroad. The general frame for a non-resident is foreign-real-estate-purchase, debt financing is non-resident-mortgage. By country: uae-property-purchase, greece-property-purchase, cyprus-property-purchase. Holding costs on the high end are in luxury-taxes.

Opening an account and being refused by the bank. A refusal is almost always about the origin of funds and the connection to a jurisdiction, not about the amount: the bank is refusing not the capital but the unverifiable history of the capital. The map of banks is banks, the logic of private service is private-banking, the choice between the two main centres is switzerland-vs-singapore-private-banking. Alternatives and the Asian perimeter: neobanks, hong-kong-bank-account, dbs-bank, puerto-rico-banks.

Inheritance and divorce. Both events expose the same weakness — the law applicable to the asset was never fixed. Until an asset is tied to a specific legal order, a foreign court will decide its fate under foreign rules. Which court may hear a cross-border divorce, and when a divorce granted abroad is recognised, is divorce-jurisdiction. The succession perimeter is succession-planning and trust-basics; the tax side of a trust for a Russian beneficiary is trust-taxation-russia-cfc. The whole family perimeter — matrimonial regime, instrument, event — is assembled in family-hub.

The sanctions dead end. A payment does not go through, an account is frozen, a counterparty walks away from settlement. The Russian perimeter is russia-hub; alternative settlement routes are china-payments and chinese-banks.

A programme closing or a status being revoked. Investment programmes change, get more expensive and shut down, and statuses already granted get reviewed; check current conditions on the product page, not in the news. The generic layer is citizenship-by-investment and golden-visas; where capital is not the entry ticket, talent-routes-models shows what replaces it. Programmes currently running: cbi-st-kitts, cbi-dominica, cbi-grenada, cbi-st-lucia, cbi-antigua, cbi-vanuatu, cbi-egypt-jordan, turkey-citizenship-investment.

A dispute with the tax authority. More often than not it starts with automatic exchange of information rather than a field audit: the gap between your return and what came in under CRS is itself the trigger. What the tax authority actually sees is tax-transparency; the frame of obligations is taxes and wealth-tax-map.

Where you are

The third entrance is geographic, and it is the most deceptive. The country where you live, the country where the company is registered, the country of the bank and the country of the asset are four independent variables, and the corpus describes them separately. A country hub gathers everything relating to one jurisdiction; a map of regimes, conversely, compares one variable across many countries at once. Start with the map if you are choosing a country, and with the hub if the country is already chosen. Between those two cuts sits a third: the relocation matrix describes twelve jurisdictions from both sides at once — what a country does when you leave it and what it demands when you enter — so the pair "country of departure → country of arrival" is one you assemble yourself, from the exit column of one and the entry column of the other.

Country hubs. singapore-hub, hong-kong-hub, uae-hub, china-hub, kazakhstan-hub, spain-hub, russia-hub, luxembourg. Each assembles the same four blocks — company, residence, banks, licences — and works as a checklist even if you came for one question.

Large tax jurisdictions without a hub cluster. uk-tax-residence-worldwide-taxation and us-tax-residency — read them before any decision to move to those countries.

Maps of regimes. Tax: special-tax-regimes, wealth-tax-map, collectibles-capital-gains. Migration: digital-nomad-visas, talent-routes-models, business-owner-routes, spain-student-visa-nomad-route, malta-student-residence-permit, malta-key-employment-initiative. Licensing: fintech-license-map, uae-license-map, usa-license-map, fintech-license-switzerland, singapore-psa-payments, singapore-dtsp, payfac-vs-iso.

Funds and collectible assets. The generic layer is funds; the choice of domicile is fund-domicile-jurisdictions, the requirements for the management company are fund-manager-jurisdictions, the Singapore combination is private-fund-singapore. Art: art-tax-planning and art-lending-vs-selling.

If the entrances disagree. Profile, event and geography often point at different hubs — that is normal and means the task is composite. In that case priority goes to the event entrance: it sets the deadlines, and deadlines in private capital are almost always harder than optimality. Read the profile hub second — it will show what is atypical in your situation. Leave the country hub for last: a jurisdiction is chosen after the composition of the decision is clear, not before.

Navigator

The table below is a compressed version of all three entrances: on the left the practical task, then two pages in the order they should be read. The first column gives the frame and the composition of the decision, the second the next level of detail. That is enough to start; the product pages with concrete numbers live inside the hubs themselves, and they are updated more often than this index.