Holding companies
A correctly constituted holding company separates trading risk from investment assets, enables dividend planning, and provides a disciplined vehicle for reinvesting proceeds from business activities.
Structures
Is your wealth held in the right legal form?
Holding companies, family foundations, and cross-border frameworks designed for controlled, cost-efficient wealth transfer.
The legal form of ownership matters as much as the assets themselves.
A high-quality portfolio held in the wrong legal vehicle — or in no deliberate vehicle at all — carries hidden costs: unnecessary tax on income and gains, exposure to personal liability, complications in succession planning, and friction whenever assets need to move between generations or jurisdictions. The Workshop designs ownership structures with a clear mandate: reduce structural risk, improve tax efficiency, and establish a governance framework that the next generation can operate. We work across the three structure types most relevant to Central European clients: Slovak and Czech holding companies, Austrian and Liechtenstein private foundations, and Luxembourg-based structures for clients with cross-border asset footprints. In each case, the structure is designed around the client's actual situation, not a template.
Structure types The Workshop advises on
Private foundations
Austrian and Liechtenstein private foundations offer a well-regulated, privacy-respecting framework for the long-term stewardship of family assets, with clear rules for governance and beneficiary distributions.
Cross-border frameworks
For clients with assets, residency, or beneficiaries across multiple EU jurisdictions, we design frameworks that minimise treaty conflict, double taxation, and administrative overhead.
What the structuring process involves — and what it does not
A structuring engagement typically runs eight to sixteen weeks. It begins with a thorough review of current asset ownership, existing legal documents, and the client's medium and long-term intentions. The Workshop then produces a written recommendation outlining two or three structural options, with a comparison of costs, timelines, tax implications, and governance requirements for each. We work alongside — not in place of — the client's existing legal and tax advisers. We do not draft legal documents or file corporate registrations; those tasks remain with qualified lawyers. Our role is to ensure that the commercial and financial logic of the structure is sound before legal implementation begins. Structures designed without that prior discipline tend to be expensive to correct later.
“Our family had accumulated assets across four countries over thirty years with no overarching structure to hold them together. The Workshop spent three months mapping everything and produced a recommendation that our lawyers described as the clearest brief they had ever received. The implementation was completed without a single material complication.”
Peter H., Bratislava — private investor, real estate and equities
Start with a structural audit, not assumptions.
Understanding what you currently have is the only reliable starting point for designing what you need.
Request a structural audit