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In cases where a Greek-connected founder has transferred a family business, investment portfolio or other substantial assets into a foreign trust or foundation, the desire to retain influence is understandable. The wealth may represent a lifetime’s work and the founder may remain best placed to understand the commercial risks, family dynamics and principles that should guide its use. Difficulty arises when reassurance is sought through a collection of powers that leaves the structure unable to operate independently of the person from whom it was intended to become separate.
The central question is whether the rights reserved at formation remain consistent with the legal character and long-term purpose of the chosen structure.
Influence is not continuing ownership
Under Liechtenstein law, a foundation comprises legally and economically independent assets constituted as a legal person for a defined purpose. In a trust, the trustee administers the transferred property in its own name as independent legal owner for the beneficiaries. Those forms allow founders or settlors to shape the arrangement, but their effectiveness depends on respecting the separation each form is intended to create.
A founder may wish to retain the right to appoint or remove office-holders, approve certain investments, influence distributions or alter aspects of the structure. None of those powers is necessarily inappropriate when considered alone. Their combined effect, however, may produce a different result. Where fiduciaries are formally responsible but every material decision remains subject to founder approval, independence may exist more clearly in the documents than in the way the structure is governed.
The powers should reflect the purpose
The appropriate balance depends on what the structure is expected to preserve. A family foundation holding shares in an operating business may require mechanisms through which commercial knowledge is retained and major changes are approached cautiously. A trust holding a diversified portfolio may call for broader fiduciary discretion within an agreed investment and distribution framework.
Founder influence should therefore be designed around defined areas of legitimate concern rather than expressed as a general right to intervene. Appointment powers, reserved matters, letters of wishes and advisory or protector-type roles can each contribute to a disciplined governance model, provided that responsibilities remain clear and office-holders can exercise the judgement legally entrusted to them.
For Greek-connected families, the analysis must also account for the domestic treatment of the foreign structure. The Greek tax authority has issued specific guidance on foreign trusts and foundations, reinforcing the need for legal design and practical administration to remain aligned across jurisdictions.
When influence becomes dependence
In practice, excessive control seldom announces itself through a single provision. It emerges from overlapping rights, informal expectations and a pattern in which independent office-holders learn that important decisions are not truly theirs to make.
That arrangement may function while the founder remains active and relationships are cooperative. Its weakness becomes visible after incapacity, death or disagreement, when successors and fiduciaries must determine which powers were personal to the founder, which continue and how authority should now be exercised.
A durable structure does not require the founder’s judgement to disappear. It requires that judgement to be translated into a governance framework capable of operating without constant intervention. The aim is to preserve appropriate influence without making continuity dependent on the continued presence of one person.