April 5th, 2015, 4:49 am
The big risk for these sorts of things is governmental risk. Once you get involved with this, then there friends in the government become your friends, but their enemies in the government become your enemies. SOE's can be very tricky, because you can find that the person you were working with gets involved in a corruption investigation (and in some countries, everyone is corrupt, the only question is how corrupt), and then you find that your money is all gone, with zero recourse. This is really cool because often your money ends up in the pockets of the new group of people.Brokering these deals is rather tricky, because typically, the types of people involved will do very bad things to you if you lose their money.So the first thing to do is to find out who those people are. Who their friends in the government are. Who their enemies in the government are. Also for these sorts of deals, you typically want to get the money, and get out as quickly as you can. The longer your money is frozen, the bigger the odds that the people involved will make an enemy, which will cause all your money to disappear immediately.The financials are pretty much irrelevant.The good news is that you have some safety if you live outside of Asia. If you are in the US, and everything goes bad, the good news is that you lose all your money, and you remember never to set foot in country X.If it's got anything to do with China, I'd take a pass right now. Xi Jinping is going after people, and there are a lot of extremely desperate and nervous officials that trying to avoid the big hammer. The people that normally finance these deals are slamming the doors in their face, so they are pretty desperate for people. One very clever thing that China has done is make a deal with the US government. China will provide the US government with tax information on US expats, and the US cooperates with China in anti-corruption. This happens to be really bad if you are living at the US, because you run the risk that they Chinese government will hand a file over to the USDOJ and you will be under investigation for FCPA violations, at that point the Chinese government keeps the cash, and you are pretty much screwed.
Last edited by
twofish on April 4th, 2015, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.