Chile Forum

rust wrote:If I recall correctly, there is a moratorium on giving liquor licences in the Quinta Region.

NEVER HAVE A CHILEAN AS THE "REPRESENTANTE LEGAL" of a sociedad/societe/partnership. THEY WILL SCREW YOU eventually.

A point of law as observed by its application: the REPRESENTANTE LEGAL, even if they have only 1% of the partnership CAN SELL/LIQUIDATE/TRANSFER any and ALL ASSETS without your say so. And even if you own 99.99% of the partnership, you will have NO SAY WHATSOEVER in what the REPRESENTANTE LEGAL does. And the COURTS will back the REPRESENTANTE LEGAL 100%.

Yea, none of that is true. It depends on how the articles of incorporation are drafted, and related documents like powers of attorney and so on. If you do not explicitly restrict what the legal rep can and can not do, then yea, just like any other place on the planet you will either get ripped off or at least have a legal mess. Beyond the articles of incorporation, there are still fraud and civil law restrictions. If you however give them explicit permission to do anything they want in the articles of incorporation, then the only person to blame is the the idiot that gave them those powers when something goes wrong.

Boy we seen some foreign clients get themselves in to mega messes (read over a million dollars in assets kissed goodbye forever ) because they made the well thought-out business decisions based on nothing more than 'but, he seemed like a nice guy that spoke really good English when we had dinner and his friend the attorney was so nice'.

By the way, most of those mega messes in Chile, involved an Argentinean. Chileans are not that creative or ambitious. If you want to be ripped off properly, then you need an Argentinian involved.

I would say 99.9% of all the legal / business messes our foreign clients find themselves in are generally traceable to their own mistakes, not some sort of fraud or criminal activity by a Chilean. Somehow, a lot of foreigners have a knack for coming to Chile, and leaving their common sense at the airport. The most ironic ones are lawyers from other countries, doing things themselves in Chile, they would never advise a client back home to do. That one, I have never been able to figure out.

People with well rounded backgrounds in doing international business, do just fine. People with no business experience or international experience, get their rears handed to them. They likely would have went belly up back home just as easily, only in their native language.

admin wrote:

By the way, most of those mega messes in Chile, involved an Argentinean. Chileans are not that creative or ambitious. If you want to be ripped off properly, then you need an Argentinian involved.

The only real difference between being scammed by Chileans vs Argentines is that the latter will at least know where to find a decent restaurant.

Yeh you just set it up from day one properly, as Admin said, this “don’t trust anyone” will keep you under your rock forever. I just have all sorts of restriction on who can do what and who can sign what cheques at what amounts, otherwise I couldn’t get anything done. In one company the articles of incorporation still stand after 23 years with very few changes and serve me well today. If you haven’t run a business in a country you live in and speak the language then jumping into a new country may not be for you. A good Lawyer is very important, I had a young woman who was just starting out at a big international firm and she worked very hard for me, now her associate covers our account with her supervision. Now if you are opening a small-small business and think a Lawyer is too expensive, think again, a few thousand may be the difference between success and failure. For restaurants I know of a gringo who leased a restaurant that was operating, he had an ironclad 5 year lease (which was worked out by his Lawyer) at the end of he bought a property and move the restaurant, he still does well, he spent 5 years before he committed to the business outside of his lease payment for the small place he started in.

My bane was Brazil, never got it going properly, so we sold it.

The problem with the Argentinians is that when there is a problem, they can just slither back over the boarder and the cost of getting them back in to a court in Chile or just getting sufficient leverage over them to simply sign a document is astronomical. Someone comes to us with a problem, and the word "Argentina" is in the conversation, I multiply the cost estimate by factor of 10. That is before we find out all the gory details, and when an Argentina national is involved there are always more gory details. Often in the end the Argentian does not make any money, or very little, but they sure leave expensive messes on their way out trying to scam a foreigner. It is like they have a scorched earth scam policy. If they can't have it, no one will.

Yea, we have seen some very big multinational companies get cleaned out in Brazil. The hot investment rush to Brazil has a lot of scams / shady deals going on and I believe a lot more foreign investors not fully thinking things through. I am not talking about wet behind the ears business people, but fairly big companies.