Quote from: kassad1 on December 11, 2018, 08:29:14 AM

Just a quick update:

I have finally managed to get ahold of a friend for a lenghty conversation who moved to the UAE two years ago. I asked him to help me find the cheapest option for rentable property that one could sublet. He actually had a great idea!

While first moving there he used a storage service provider that specializes in servicing expats. See when you are moving to the UAE in the begining it's hard to get a local postal address that you can have your stuff, personal packages and deliveries shipped to (when you don't have either a permanent residential address yet). For this purpose a lot of expats use a storage service. They rent a storage room that has it's own postal address, receive their deliveries there and pick them up in the next 15 days. Basically you can think of it as a PO box that is (instead of the size of drawer or closet) is the size of an entire room. The service provider he used quoted me AED4100 ($1150/1000) for a year for their smallest package and they asured me that they do allow subletting for profit. They also seemed really flexible too (they're used to special needs of the expats) as they have bank accounts in both the US and Europe that you can send their fees to (to minimize your transaction costs).

So this confirms that the preliminary numbers I have posted above are in fact the reality: 'So for 1k you get to not pay any taxes on 90k worth of income. That sounds like a pretty good deal to me. You can also repeat the thing for family members so 90k/person/year for the cost of 1k/person/year. So you have about 1.1% cost.' (that's $1150 cost for every $102k if you are in usd)

That's smart. It's still tax evasion (+ money laundering) though since while you now have a plausible source of income, it also is not the actual source of income.

Whether you'd be caught is a different question of course, but receiving EUR 90k,- worth of income from the UAE for a property that is worth EUR 1k,- in rent may raise some eyebrows and trigger some deeper investigations.