PANDORA PAPERS | A GLOBAL INVESTIGATION
THE ‘COWBOY COCKTAIL’: HOW WYOMING BECAME ONE OF THE WORLD’S TOP TAX HAVENS

An oligarch, a dictator’s aide and a beverage tycoon turned to America’s least populated state to shelter assets, the Pandora Papers show

By Debbie Cenziper and Will Fitzgibbon
Dec. 20, 2021

JACKSON, Wyo. — The honky-tonk bar under neon lights on the town square serves Grand Teton Amber Ale and Yellowstone Lemonade. The Cowboy Coffee Co. offers bison chili, and the Five & Dime General Store sells Stetson hats and souvenirs made from bullets.

In this tourist-friendly Western town, home to four celebrated arches fashioned from elk antlers, lawyers and estate planners draw customers with something far more exclusive. ... It’s called the “Cowboy Cocktail,” and in recent years the coveted financial arrangement has attracted a new set of outsiders to the least populated state in America.

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.

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About this story
Will Fitzgibbon is with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Design and development by Jake Crump and Frank Hulley-Jones.

Brenda Medina and Delphine Reuter at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Mika Velikovskiy at iStories (Russia), Alicia Ortega Hasbún at Noticias SIN (Dominican Republic), Paolo Biondani at L’Espresso (Italy), and Sandra Crucianelli and Mariel Fitz Patrick at Infobae (Argentina) contributed to this report.

The Pandora Papers is an investigation based on more than 11.9 million documents revealing the flows of money, property and other assets concealed in the offshore financial system. The Washington Post and other news organizations exposed the involvement of political leaders, examined the growth of the industry within the United States and demonstrated how secrecy shields assets from governments, creditors and those abused or exploited by the wealthy and powerful. The trove of confidential information, the largest of its kind, was obtained by the ICIJ, which organized the investigation. Read more about this project.

Debbie Cenziper
Follow https://twitter.com/debbiecenziper
Debbie Cenziper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning contributing reporter on the investigative team. For 25 years, Debbie has explored social issues, including affordable housing, education, voting rights and mental health care. At The Post, she has focused heavily on Washington, D.C., writing about development issues that affect poor neighborhoods.