About a year and a half ago, the sleepy state of South Dakota found itself rudely awoken by the global spotlight. In a filing for his Hong Kong-listed company, Sunac, Sun Hongbin, the Chinese real estate tycoon with a net worth around $10 billion, disclosed he had just transferred his shares to the South Dakota Trust Company. To the surprise of most analysts, a small, two-story brick building in downtown Sioux Falls was the proud custodian of a chunk of shares that is now worth more than $6 billion.
What’s more, as Bloomberg News reported at the time, three other Chinese businessmen had moved billions to South Dakota trusts just weeks before Sun did. The incongruity was lost on no one, and many observers started to wonder what, exactly, was going on in South Dakota. Suddenly, the 97 trust companies licensed to do business in South Dakota felt the global gaze upon them.
“Are people here talking about it? No,” Jason Krause, a lawyer in Sioux Falls, says of the influx of
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