Wealth Can Cross Borders. Governance Cannot Carry Itself.

A Liechtenstein court ruling late last year has been circulating in wealth management circles, prompting a debate still unresolved. s

The facts are these. Polish billionaire Zygmunt Solorz placed the controlling stakes in his media empire into two Liechtenstein foundations. A family dispute followed. Solorz signed succession declarations transferring control to his three children, then sought to revoke them. What makes the case legally instructive is that Solorz had successfully reversed a similar transfer in 2023 without challenge. In 2024, the same mechanism became irreversible. Not because the law had changed. But because his children chose to contest the revocation rather than accommodate it, and the Liechtenstein courts upheld the 2024 transfer, finding the declarations lawfully made and properly executed. Solorz lost control of companies he had spent a lifetime building.

The debate among practitioners is whether this represents a failure of the Liechtenstein foundation structure or a demonstration that it worked exactly as designed. On the available public record and the courts’ findings, the outcome points to the latter. The foundation operated in accordance with its deed, as interpreted by the courts. The courts upheld the transfer based on their interpretation of the law and the foundation deed. The courts found no basis to invalidate the declarations on the available evidence. From the facts now in the public domain, what seems to have happened, at its core, was a family dispute in which a founder made a binding legal commitment, the family dynamic then shifted, and the law held him to it. This is not a failure of the structure, but an instance of the structure performing as designed. Whether an independent governance function was present alongside Solorz at the moment of signing is not known from the public record. And it would be an overstatement to suggest that such a function would have changed the outcome. If the children were determined to enforce the declarations, no advisory process would have altered the legal result. What the case does make visible, more clearly than most, is the category of moment for which that function is specifically designed. A founder and a family at a point of irreversible commitment. A structure precise enough to bind them to whatever was signed. A family dynamic whose direction only became fully legible after the fact.

This is precisely why these structures have become a serious option for Asian UHNW families who want their succession intentions to be durable and enforceable across generations. The Solorz case demonstrates, with unusual clarity, how a properly structured Liechtenstein foundation can hold under pressure. For families whose primary concern is that wealth built over decades should survive the pressures that inevitably arrive, that is not a warning. It can be read as a demonstration of how such structures function under dispute. The questions worth asking before engaging these instruments are not about whether to trust them. They are about preparation. Ensuring that what is signed reflects what is genuinely intended. Ensuring the family has a governed process for managing disagreements before the structure’s precision becomes its only arbiter.

THE DISCOVERY IS REAL

Among practitioners working with Asian families, there has been a discernible shift in recent years in how sophisticated clients think about wealth architecture. It is not primarily driven by tax. It is driven by visibility. By the accumulating evidence of what happens when wealth passes between generations without a governance framework the whole family understands, has genuinely agreed to, and can activate under pressure rather than merely in theory. The governance failures documented in this article pre-date the current environment. But the conditions of 2026 make the coordination gap more consequential than when those cases first arose. Capital mobility is accelerating. Succession timelines are compressing under geopolitical uncertainty. Advisory relationships are fragmenting across more jurisdictions than ever. All of which amplifies the cost of arriving at a decisive moment without a governed process in place.

The cases are documented. A Singapore-listed conglomerate with independent directors, MAS regulatory oversight, and strong conventional governance scores experiences a public boardroom crisis because the informal authority architecture between a patriarch and his son was never formally documented. Shares dive to a sixteen-year low. A South Korean industrial dynasty faces a KRW 12 trillion inheritance tax liability, not because estate planning tools were unavailable, but because the pre-death gifting programs, insurance-funded liquidity structures, and holding company reorganizations available under Korean tax law throughout the six years between the patriarch’s 2014 cardiac event and his 2020 death were not executed at a scale sufficient to materially reduce the liability. A Philippine bus empire employing more than 18,000 people enters protracted litigation because a family constitution was drafted but never formally ratified. A Polish billionaire loses control of his media empire because he signed succession documents in a family dynamic that had already shifted to the point where the children chose to enforce rather than release them.

The cases point to the same conclusion. Structural architecture alone is not sufficient. What is needed, in addition to the structure itself, is something that sits outside the immediate family and outside the immediate jurisdiction. Something durable, governed, and professionally administered. For families in civil law jurisdictions with forced heirship exposure, Liechtenstein foundation structures have become an increasingly discussed option. But the Solorz case, understood correctly, suggests that the instrument is only part of what is needed.

WHAT EUROPEAN STRUCTURES OFFER AND HOW TO USE THEM WELL

The instrument is frequently misunderstood in Asian advisory conversations, usually in the direction of overstatement. What it actually provides is narrower than the reputation suggests.

A properly structured Liechtenstein foundation can hold assets across multiple jurisdictions and provide a legally administered governance vehicle for long-term wealth stewardship. The Stiftungsrat, the foundation’s governing council, is a formally constituted body whose fiduciary duties run to the foundation and its stipulated purposes rather than to any individual family member. In appropriate circumstances, and with careful structuring, the instrument can offer a degree of insulation from the forced heirship regimes that complicate estate planning across Southeast Asia. Liechtenstein has a well-developed body of foundation law, a sophisticated regulatory framework, and a decades-long track record as a structuring jurisdiction for internationally mobile wealth.

But four qualifications belong alongside any such description. Each is material for Asian families considering this route.

First, the extent to which a Liechtenstein structure protects assets from forced heirship claims depends entirely on the conflict of laws rules applied by the home jurisdiction court, and on whether transfers into the structure can withstand scrutiny under local law. In the Philippines, the forced heirship provisions of the Civil Code apply to the estate of a Philippine national. A Philippine court confronting a forced heir’s claim will assess whether the transfer into the foundation constitutes a completed inter vivos gift or an advancement subject to collation under Articles 887 to 914 and 1061 to 1077 of the Civil Code. That question is unresolved in Philippine jurisprudence as applied to offshore foundation structures. The outcome in any given case will depend on the specific facts, the timing of the transfers, and the composition of the foundation’s beneficiary class. The protection can be real, but it depends on careful structuring and specialist advice in both jurisdictions, and cannot be assumed. Families considering this route should engage Philippine and Liechtenstein counsel in parallel, with a coordinating function holding the interface between them.

The timing point deserves to be stated plainly rather than left as a qualifier. A Liechtenstein foundation established well in advance of any triggering event, whether that event is a health crisis, a family dispute, or the death of a founder, is a structurally different instrument from one established in the shadow of any of those things. A transfer made years before a forced heirship claim arises, into a structure with clear beneficiary designations and a functioning Stiftungsrat, has a materially stronger basis to be treated as a completed inter vivos disposition than a transfer made after a diagnosis, after a dispute has begun to surface, or after a relationship has already deteriorated. Philippine courts assessing collation under Articles 1061 to 1077 of the Civil Code, Korean courts reviewing pre-death gifting programs, and Singaporean courts examining the validity of trust transfers may apply closer scrutiny when the timing of the transaction suggests motivated structuring in anticipation of a specific claim. Samsung, to name the Korean case directly, is instructive here, not as a failure of the structure but as a failure of the timeline. The tools were available. The planning window was six years long. The family arrived at the patriarch’s death in 2020 having used far less of that window than the liability required. That is not a Liechtenstein-specific problem. It is a planning horizon problem, and it applies equally to every structure discussed in this article. The families who will use these instruments most effectively are the ones who begin the conversation before there is any urgency to do so. For families still inside their planning window, the practical implication is to begin the structural conversation well before any event makes it urgent, and to treat the coordination of specialists across jurisdictions as its own work stream.

Vietnam warrants a separate and more significant caution. In the wake of the Van Thinh Phat case and the State Bank of Vietnam’s enforcement response in 2022, Vietnamese authorities have tightened aspects of capital controls and foreign asset reporting requirements in recent years. The practical ability to hold Vietnamese family assets in a Liechtenstein structure, and to have that structure respected by Vietnamese authorities, is more constrained than in the Philippines, Korea, or Indonesia. Families with material Vietnamese assets should take specialist advice on current regulatory conditions before assuming that offshore structuring is available to them on the same terms as in other Southeast Asian markets. And they should treat that assessment as a distinct and ongoing engagement, rather than a one-time precondition to structuring.

Second, a Liechtenstein foundation sitting over assets connected to common law jurisdictions will almost always require an additional layer of structure, typically a Singapore trust, a BVI holding company, or a similar common law vehicle, to operate effectively within those jurisdictions. The foundation rarely stands alone as the single governing instrument for a multi-jurisdictional Asian family. It is more commonly one layer within a more complex architecture, and the interaction between the layers needs to be designed with care.

Third, the deed and the Stiftungsrat’s governance mechanisms are designed to administer the structure in accordance with what has been stipulated. They are not designed to ensure that what was stipulated reflects what the founder actually intended, that all family members understood the implications of what was agreed, or that the family retains the relational capacity to operate the structure together when circumstances change. Those functions belong somewhere else.

Fourth, the regulatory dimension of establishing and maintaining a Liechtenstein foundation has become more demanding in recent years. Beneficial ownership registration, FATF compliance documentation, and ongoing administrative obligations mean that the operational burden on both the founding family and the Stiftungsrat has increased materially. Families approaching these structures for the first time should expect a more rigorous onboarding process than was standard a decade ago, and should factor ongoing compliance costs into their assessment of the structure’s utility.

The instrument did not fail in the Solorz case. The courts were right. What the case makes visible is something more precise. A category of moment, a founder at the point of irreversible commitment, for which the standard advisory architecture around European governance structures is rarely designed. Not because the outcome could necessarily have been prevented. But because the family had no governed process for managing disagreements that did not ultimately lead to a courtroom.

A NOTE ON SWITZERLAND

The coverage that brought the Solorz case to wider attention suggested that Switzerland stands to gain from Liechtenstein’s difficulties. This framing deserves scrutiny, and practitioners familiar with both jurisdictions have been quick to offer it.

Switzerland does not have its own foundation law in the sense that Liechtenstein does. Swiss foundations are governed by Articles 80 to 89a of the Swiss Civil Code, operate under cantonal and federal supervisory oversight, and are generally not designed for the kind of private international wealth structuring that Liechtenstein foundations serve. There is a category of Swiss private family foundation, the Familienstiftung, that can serve certain private wealth purposes. But its permitted uses are more restricted than the Liechtenstein equivalent, it is subject to mandatory supervisory authority oversight, and it does not offer the same flexibility in terms of beneficiary classes, asset holding, and governance customization. Switzerland also has no trust law of its own. Swiss law recognizes foreign trusts following ratification of the Hague Trust Convention, which came into force in Switzerland on 1 July 2007, but a Swiss trustee administering a trust does so under the law of the trust’s establishing jurisdiction, not under a Swiss trust statute.

The suggestion that Swiss structures offer a straightforward alternative to Liechtenstein foundations for Asian families with complex cross-border succession needs is not clearly supported by the legal architecture. The two jurisdictions serve different purposes and are frequently used in conjunction rather than as alternatives. For the families this article is concerned with, the relevant question is not Switzerland versus Liechtenstein. It is how the available European structuring tools, from whichever jurisdiction, are embedded within a governance process that actually serves the family’s long-term intentions.

WHAT THE STRUCTURE CANNOT DO ALONE

The Solorz case, read carefully, is an argument for these structures rather than against them. The Liechtenstein courts found, on the available public record, that the succession declarations were valid in accordance with what the courts determined the deed to require. The structure did what it was designed to do, and it did so with a level of legal precision that families focused on durable succession may find reassuring. A structure that holds under the pressure of a family dispute is exactly what multi-generational wealth requires. The harder question the case raises is not about the instrument. It is about what sits alongside it. Why a family that had spent years planning a succession arrived at a moment where the founder signed documents in a family dynamic that had already shifted to the point where the children chose enforcement over accommodation, and whether that moment could have been better prepared for.

That question points to a function that is largely absent from the standard advisory architecture around European governance structures. The trustee’s mandate runs to the foundation and its purposes. The lawyer’s mandate is the document. The private banker’s mandate is the portfolio. None of these mandates, as conventionally structured, extends to sitting alongside the family at the moment of commitment, ensuring the process is deliberate and properly understood by all parties, surfacing the family dynamics that will determine whether the structure holds under stress, or creating a governed process for managing disagreements before they reach a court.

A governed process, in this sense, is the architecture that sits between the family and its legal structures. It is the documented method by which decisions are reached, disagreements are surfaced before they escalate, authority is assigned without ambiguity, and an independent point of reference holds the whole together over time. It is the layer most architectures do not include, because no single discipline in the standard advisory model is positioned to create it.

This is the coordination gap. The Solorz case illustrates it at the moment of signing. CDL, to name the Singapore case directly, illustrates it in the years preceding a crisis, when informal authority arrangements that were never formally documented accumulated into a governance failure that formal board structures could not contain. In both instances, the failure trace leads back to the same place. The absence of an independent function responsible for the space between the advisor’s mandate and the family’s actual situation, not at the moment of legal completion, but at the moment of human commitment.

THE QUESTIONS ASIAN FAMILIES ARE BEGINNING TO ASK

Practitioners working with Asian UHNW families in Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Seoul, and Jakarta report a shift in the questions families are asking. The question is no longer simply which structure to establish or which jurisdiction to use. It is this. Who coordinates all of this on our behalf, and how do we ensure the structure we build actually reflects what we intend and survives the pressures that will inevitably arrive?

Recent data from the 2026 Campden Wealth and BNP Paribas Asia Pacific Family Office Report confirms that only 50 percent of formally established family offices in the Asia Pacific region have formal succession plans in place. That figure covers families who have already taken the step of organizing a family office structure. For the broader UHNW population that has not yet done so, the gap is likely wider. A 2026 Channel NewsAsia analysis found that 55 percent of family businesses in Singapore, a distinct population that includes a wider range of business-owning families beyond formal family offices, operate without a documented succession strategy. Taken together, the two figures describe a consistent pattern across both the most and the least formally organized ends of the Asian UHNW spectrum. A November 2025 Sun Life survey of business-owning families across Asia, reported by Finews Asia, found that only 27 percent have a complete succession framework in place, meaning nearly three quarters of the region’s family business owners remain without a fully developed plan. That figure covers a broader population than formal family offices and is the starkest current measure of the gap this article addresses.

The instrument performed as its deed required. What the Solorz case makes visible is the moment that precedes any deed. Who was sitting alongside the founder, and what was their mandate? That question does not have a legal answer. It has an advisory one.

That function, whatever it is called and however it is structured in any given engagement, is what cases like Solorz make visible by its absence. The structural tools were sophisticated. The jurisdiction was credible. And still, a family arrived at a decisive moment without the independent perspective that is specifically designed to ensure the process is governed rather than merely transactional.

THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATION

For practitioners advising Asian families on European governance structures, the Solorz case is not an argument against Liechtenstein or against foundation structures. It is an argument for building the human and relational architecture around those structures with the same care that goes into drafting the deed.

That means, at a minimum, ensuring that every family member with a material interest in the structure understands what it does, what it cannot do, and what the governed process is for managing disagreements. It means that the moment of signing a succession declaration, or a family charter, or any instrument that affects the distribution of control, is a facilitated process rather than a transactional one. And it means the family has an independent point of reference, not affiliated with the trustee, the bank, or the law firm, whose role is to hold the governance process together over time rather than to complete a specific transaction.

How that function is structured in regulatory and professional terms will vary by jurisdiction. In Singapore, for instance, the scope of activities that require a Capital Markets Services license or a financial advisor’s license is defined by the Securities and Futures Act and the Financial Advisors Act, and practitioners considering how to structure an independent coordinating role should take specialist advice on their own regulatory position before engaging. MAS has, in recent guidance and consultations, emphasised governance and operational risk management frameworks, which reinforces rather than complicates the case for an independent coordination function. A well-structured governance advisory role that sits outside the licensed mandate is broadly consistent with MAS’s stated expectation that wealth management firms maintain clear accountability and oversight frameworks, and that clients receive advice from functions whose remit is genuinely aligned with their interests.

Wealth crosses borders efficiently. Structures can be established quickly, and legal documentation for a Liechtenstein foundation or a Singapore trust can, in straightforward cases, be completed within relatively short timeframes, i.e., in weeks, though more complex multi-jurisdictional arrangements take longer and the regulatory onboarding requirements in both jurisdictions have become materially more demanding in recent years. What cannot be compressed into any timeline is the relational work that determines whether the structure, once established, actually serves the family it was built for.

Families building these structures deserve to know that the relational architecture around them requires the same quality of attention as the deed itself. Knowing that is the beginning of asking better questions of every advisor in the room. Not only what does this structure do, but who is responsible for ensuring that what was agreed is what was intended, and that the family has a governed process for managing disagreements when circumstances change. That question is not a legal one. It belongs to the advisory relationship that precedes, accompanies, and outlasts every document the lawyers produce.

And it is a question best asked early. The families who engage these structures most effectively are not the ones responding to a crisis. They are the ones who, years before any event that would make succession planning urgent, chose to begin. They built the structure before the diagnosis, before the dispute, before the moment when the family dynamic had already shifted and the only remaining question was how the law would apply to what had already been signed. For the advisors reading these pages, that is the practical message the cases in this article carry. The instrument is available. The jurisdiction is capable. The potential protection is real. The families who need it most are the ones who have not yet decided it is urgent.

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Disclaimer: This article is contributed by the author and reflects their views. It does not constitute legal, tax or investment advice. Readers should seek independent professional advice before acting on any of the matters discussed.

Lara Jud has nineteen years of experience across Swiss and Luxembourg wealth management and family office environments, including roles as Managing Director and COO at a FINMA-regulated Swiss asset manager and board service at a Luxembourg-regulated AIF. Her current research focuses on governance failure patterns across Asian UHNW families. She is the author of the Asian UHNW Governance Case Library, a practitioner research instrument covering 25 documented governance failures and successes across nine Asian markets. The library is available to practitioners upon request.