Pacific Trustees

Pacific Trustees We provide Institutional Trust, Private Wealth and Corporate Secretarial services in SG, KL, HK, LBN. Pacific Trustees is an independent trust company.

Unlike other trust companies, we are not part of any larger institution that may require us to serve competing or conflicting interests. PTB has always been able to act independently and professionally without any adverse conflict of interest situation especially in transaction among related parties or within Group of banking companies. This reassurance to act fairly and impartially at all times i

s a critical role of a trustee as stakeholder safeguarding the interest of its beneficiaries. A team of dedicated qualified professionals with extensive experiences heads PTB. To provide and maintain quality services on a continuing basis, every assignment is assigned an experienced Head from inception of a transaction to maturity thereby mitigating a lot of follow through issues which is inherent to every project.

THE MAN IN THE MIRRORYour Will Is Not About Death. It Is About What You Built.By Edward Cheah,Pacific Trustees Friday, 1...
22/06/2026

THE MAN IN THE MIRROR

Your Will Is Not About Death. It Is About What You Built.

By Edward Cheah,
Pacific Trustees Friday, 19/06/2026

He was 80 years old.

He had built a business, raised a family, weathered recessions, and outlasted competitors half his age. By any measure, he had lived a full life.

He knew he needed a will. He had known for years. And yet every time the conversation came up, he found a reason to defer. Not because he feared death. He had made a certain peace with that. He deferred because, at 80, he still felt his life was incomplete. Still felt he had not yet arrived at the results he had set out to achieve. Still believed that when things were more settled; when the business was in better shape, when the family matters were resolved, when he had more to show for himself, then he would sit down and do it properly.

He died intestate.

The estate that took a lifetime to build entered a legal process he never chose, distributed according to a formula he never approved, administered by proceedings that took years and cost far more than a will ever would have. The family he spent his life providing for was left navigating courts instead of grieving.

He did not fail to write a will because he did not care. He failed to write one because he never felt ready to look at his results.

The Real Reason We Avoid It

Most conversations about will-writing begin and end at the same place: people avoid it because it reminds them of death. It is treated as a cultural taboo, a morbid exercise, something to be deferred until the last possible moment.

That explanation is too simple. And it lets too many people off the hook.

The deeper truth is this: a will is not a death document. It is a results document. It is a record of what you have built; your assets, your relationships, your responsibilities, your intentions. And the reason most people avoid it has less to do with death-aversion than with something far more common.

Results-aversion.

We avoid looking at things that reflect where we actually are versus where we imagined we would be.
We delay checking the bank balance after a difficult month.
We postpone the medical screening because we are not sure we want to know.
We put off the business review because the numbers might confirm what we already suspect.

Writing a will triggers that same instinct. It asks you to sit down and produce a document that reflects your current reality. Not the reality you are working toward. Not the life you intend to build. The life you have built so far.

And many people are simply not ready to face that.

So they wait. They tell themselves life is still in progress. That the results are not final yet. That they will do it when things look better; when they own more, have resolved the family complexities, feel more confident about what they have to show.

But here is what that reasoning costs them: it assumes tomorrow is guaranteed. It assumes there will be time to improve the results before anyone has to see them.

There won't always be.
A Will Is Easier to Avoid Than Insurance, And That Is the Problem

Consider why Malaysians find it far easier to buy insurance than to write a will.

Insurance is a bet about the future. It is abstract, distant, emotionally manageable. You pay a premium, a salesperson guides you through the process, and the discomfort is deferred. You are not asked to look at anything real today. Buying insurance feels like adding, building protection, growing the safety net.

Writing a will asks something different entirely. It asks you to look at the present. To answer, with clarity:
What do I actually own?
Is it structured correctly?
Who gets what and does that reflect what I truly value?
What happens to the people who depend on me if I am not here tomorrow?

These are not comfortable questions. They do not have the reassuring polish of an insurance brochure. They require you to confront your actual life; your assets, your relationships, your gaps, without the buffer of abstraction.

This is why Malaysians are not, at their core, averse to planning. They are averse to clarity. Insurance offers planning without clarity. A will demands both.

What You Have Built Is More Than You Think

Here is what the 80-year-old never got to discover.

Had he sat down, truly sat down to write his will, he would have been forced to take stock. To look at what he had accumulated over a lifetime of effort. The properties. The business interests. The savings. The relationships he had sustained. The people who depended on him and trusted him.

He would have seen, perhaps for the first time with full clarity, that his results were not as incomplete as he believed.

This is the quiet tragedy of results-aversion. The life we are waiting to feel proud of is often already there. We are simply too busy measuring the distance to the finish line to notice what we have already crossed.

A will is not only a legal instrument. For many people, writing one is the first time they sit down and say: this is what I built. And in that moment, they realise it is worth protecting. Worth passing on. Worth documenting with intention rather than leaving to chance.

Life Does Not Wait For You To Be Ready

There is no version of "later" that makes this easier.

The family dynamics do not simplify with time. The assets do not organise themselves. The conversations do not become less complicated. What changes is only your capacity to act and the window within which your intentions can still be honoured.

The man who waits until his results are good enough to show will wait forever. Because the measuring stick moves with him. And one day, without warning, the opportunity to document his intentions, protect his family, and give shape to his legacy will simply close.

Not because he ran out of life.

Because he ran out of time to look at it.

Pacific Trustees Berhad: Legacy Planning, Done With Intention

At Pacific Trustees Berhad, we have sat with clients at every stage of life, young professionals writing their first will, business owners structuring multi-generational trusts, elderly clients finally ready to face what they have built.

What we have learned is this: the conversation is almost never as difficult as the anticipation of it. And what people find, when they finally look at their results, is almost always more than they expected.

As a licensed corporate trustee under the Trust Companies Act 1949, Pacific Trustees Berhad provides comprehensive services delivered with institutional rigour and the discretion these conversations deserve:
Will Drafting
Trust planning
Estate Administration

Your life's work deserves to be passed on with intention, not left to the courts to decide.
Speak with Pacific Trustees Berhad today. Your legacy is ready to be documented, even if you are not sure you are.

26/05/2026

Selamat Hari Raya Aidiladha from Pacific Trustees.

On this blessed occasion, we extend our warmest wishes of joy, peace, and prosperity to our valued clients, partners, and friends. May the spirit of sacrifice and gratitude inspire us all toward greater heights.

Thank you for your enduring trust and partnership. Wishing you and your family a safe and fulfilling celebration.





A Family Office Is Not just a Tax Vehicle. It Is a Decision About What Survives You.By Edward Cheah,Pacific Trustees Thu...
22/05/2026

A Family Office Is Not just a Tax Vehicle. It Is a Decision About What Survives You.

By Edward Cheah,
Pacific Trustees Thursday, 21/05/2026

The meeting takes place in a conference room at a law firm in Kuala Lumpur, eleven months after the patriarch's death.

Five people are present the three children, the family's longtime lawyer, and an accountant who has worked with the family for two decades. The youngest brother, who never joined the business, has just learned that his sister and older brother control seventy percent of the family's holding company. He had assumed the shares were split equally. They were not. The patriarch restructured the holding company in 2011 and did not tell him.
The lawyer explains that the structure is binding. The youngest brother says he will challenge it. The older brother says there is nothing to challenge. The sister, who is closer to the youngest, asks whether there is some way to make this fair.
The Tan family will spend the next four years in court.

This is a composite. The names are not real and the specifics vary. The pattern does not. We have advised on enough of these to know how predictably they unfold and how preventable they are.

What actually went wrong
The Tan family had wealth. What they did not have was a structure.The patriarch built a successful regional manufacturing business over four decades. By the time he was in his late sixties, his investible assets a mix of operating business equity, listed securities held through a Singapore holding company, real estate in Malaysia and Australia, and an investment portfolio managed by a private bank in Hong Kong were worth somewhere north of three hundred million ringgit. He had a will. He had an accountant. He had a lawyer he trusted. He believed, as most patriarchs in his position believe, that he had time.

He did not have a trust. He did not have a foundation. He did not have a trustee with authority to act when he could not. He did not have a family constitution, a governance framework, or any written document that explained to his three children what he intended after he was gone. The 2011 restructuring which shifted control of the holding company in favour of his eldest and his daughter, on the reasonable judgment that they understood the business and his youngest did not was done with his accountant over the course of two meetings. It was legally clean. It was familially catastrophic.

When he died of a stroke at seventy-one, what should have been a straightforward generational handover became four years of litigation, three frozen bank accounts, a forced sale of one of the family's strongest assets to pay legal fees, and the permanent loss of any working relationship between the youngest brother and his siblings. The wealth survived. The family did not.
The architecture that would have prevented it
The Tans did not need a more clever tax structure. They needed an architecture that did three things their existing arrangement could not.
It needed to hold the family's wealth in an entity that was not the patriarch personally. A trust, a foundation, or a similar fiduciary structure owned by the family, governed by clear rules, administered by an independent trustee. When the patriarch died, that entity did not die with him. It continued to hold the assets, with continuity of management and a documented basis for distributions.

It needed to embed succession rules that were binding and visible to everyone affected by them. Not a will to be read after death. A living document a trust deed, a foundation charter, or a family constitution that the children knew about, understood, and had been part of negotiating during the patriarch's lifetime. The 2011 restructuring would have either not happened, or would have happened with the youngest brother in the room. Either outcome would have been better than the one that occurred.

It needed to separate ownership from active management. The investment portfolio, the operating business, and the real estate sit in different vehicles, owned by the structuring layer above. When a dispute arises about ownership, the active management vehicles continue to operate. Salaries are paid, investments are managed, assets are not frozen because the family is fighting.

These are not exotic requirements. They are how serious family wealth has been structured for generations in Europe and the United States. The Rockefeller family office was established in 1882. The same principles apply in Asia today; they have simply not, until recently, been particularly accessible to Asian families operating at the RM200 to 500 million wealth tier.

Why this architecture is now uniquely available in Malaysia

If the Tans were a family we were advising today, the structure we would help them build would have two layers.
The upper layer would be a Labuan foundation or trust depending on the family's preferences around control, beneficiary definition, and cross-border considerations. The Labuan layer holds the family's strategic equity, defines the succession framework, names the trustees, and embeds the family's governance rules. Labuan has been doing this work since 1990. Its toolkit is mature: trusts under common law principles, foundations suited to civil-law jurisdictions, private trust companies for families who want internal control, protected cell companies for asset segregation. This layer is about what survives.

The lower layer would be a Single Family Office Vehicle in the Forest City Special Financial Zone in Johor. Owned by the Labuan structure, the SFOV actively manages the family's liquid investment portfolio. It operates from Pulau 1 with a small professional team. It pays zero percent tax on qualifying income for at least ten years and, on renewal, another ten. The minimum entry threshold is RM30 million in assets under management a number deliberately set to make serious family office capability accessible at the wealth tier where most Malaysian and regional Asian families actually sit. This layer is about what compounds.

Both layers are Malaysian. Both are regulated by Malaysian authorities the Labuan Financial Services Authority for the upper, the Securities Commission Malaysia for the lower. Both are served by Malaysian professionals, banks, and trustees. The family does not need to reach across to a third jurisdiction for the structuring work.
This combination onshore tax-efficient active management and established offshore structuring depth, within one country does not exist anywhere else in Asia. Singapore has built one of the world's most respected family office regimes, and for families with global mandates and AUM in the very high tiers, it remains the appropriate choice. Hong Kong has built an elegant 0% concession that is essential for families with deep China exposure. Neither has an offshore structuring sister jurisdiction within their own borders. Families using either Singapore or Hong Kong who need a robust succession and asset protection layer must reach to Cayman, the British Virgin Islands, or Jersey adding a third jurisdiction whose treaty access is contested and whose transparency framework is under sustained pressure from the OECD and EU.

Malaysia is the only place in Asia where both layers can sit in the same country, regulated by the same domestic framework, served by the same trustees and advisers across both. For families who think seriously about what their wealth needs to do across generations not just where it pays the least tax this year that combination is materially valuable.

The conversation worth having
There is no jurisdiction that is correct for every family. A family with a global investment mandate and a billion ringgit in AUM may rationally choose Singapore. A family with three generations of business interests in mainland China may rationally choose Hong Kong. The jurisdictions are not directly comparable in every dimension, and pretending otherwise is unhelpful.
What is true is that the question worth asking is not where will my family office pay the lowest tax. It is what structure, in which jurisdiction, gives my family the best chance of being intact thirty years from now.

The Tans' problem was not that they chose the wrong jurisdiction. It was that they never had the conversation. By the time it became urgent, the patriarch was no longer in the room.
At Pacific Trustees, we have spent decades working with Malaysian and regional families on exactly this conversation across Labuan, Forest City, and onshore Malaysian trust structures. We are not the right answer for every family, and we are not in the business of pushing structures families do not need. We are in the business of asking the questions that should be asked before the meeting at the law firm becomes necessary.
That conversation costs nothing to begin. The cost of not having it is what the Tans paid.

https://www.pacifictrustees.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/A-Family-Office-Is-Not-just-a-Tax-Vehicle.-It-Is-a-Decision-About-What-Survives-You.-1.pdf

RON95 Subsidy Cuts is Just The BeginningBy Edward Cheah, Pacific TrusteesWednesday, 13/05/2026The RON95 subsidy cut is t...
13/05/2026

RON95 Subsidy Cuts is Just The Beginning

By Edward Cheah, Pacific Trustees
Wednesday, 13/05/2026

The RON95 subsidy cut is the fiscal story everyone is reading about this week.
It is not the fiscal story that matters most for Malaysian families with property and business interests.

That distinction is worth pausing on.

Yes, the price of RON95 will roughly double for higher-income households once subsidies are withdrawn — from RM1.99 to around RM4.02 per litre. Yes, the debate around where the T20 cut-off should sit is a legitimate one. But strip away the news cycle, and a more consequential conversation has been happening quietly in policy circles.

During the Budget 2025 deliberations, inheritance tax was openly listed among several proposed new revenue measures being considered. It joined high-value goods tax, carbon tax, and others. That discussion has continued since.

Malaysia has not had an inheritance tax since 1991. For thirty-five years, that absence has shaped how Malaysian families plan their wealth — or, more often, how they don't. There has been no fiscal urgency. No tax penalty for putting off the will, the trust, the property restructuring. Estate planning has lived comfortably on the "someday" list for an entire generation.

The current policy environment is making that mindset worth a fresh look.

This isn't about one tax. It's about a pattern.
Over the past three fiscal years:
→ Capital gains tax was introduced in January 2024 under Section 4(aa) of the Income Tax Act — the first formal capital gains levy in decades.
→ The SST base was broadened, stamp duty self-assessment was introduced, and e-invoicing rolled out across business sizes.
→ Now, RON95 subsidies for higher-income groups are being withdrawn.

Each of these measures has been politically calibrated to remain manageable on its own. Together, they reflect a clearly stated policy direction: the government has said repeatedly that it intends to close the fiscal gap primarily through revenue.

This is not a prediction about what comes next. Whether inheritance tax is ultimately reintroduced rests with the government and Parliament, and there are reasonable views on multiple sides. But the conditions that made estate duty uneconomical in 1991 have meaningfully changed.

Three things in particular:
Asset values. A typical landed home in Klang Valley today would have exceeded the top duty bracket of the 1941 Estate Duty Enactment. The collection arithmetic of 1991 was built around a different property market.
Administrative capacity. The IRB now operates with infrastructure that did not exist three decades ago — e-invoicing, MyTax, beneficial ownership registries, CRS data exchange with other jurisdictions.
Public discussion. The topic is no longer politically untouchable. It has been raised, openly, in budget deliberations.
For families with meaningful estates, the prudent response is not to wait for policy certainty before planning. It is to make sure the family's wealth structure is sound, well-documented, and resilient — whichever direction policy ultimately takes.

That typically involves reviewing:
✓ Whether your current will reflects today's family and business reality
✓ For Muslim families, how wasiat, faraid, and hibah arrangements interact
✓ Whether trust structures could provide better control, continuity, or privacy — private trusts, Labuan trusts, hibah amanah
✓ Liquidity at the point of inheritance, often through insurance-based planning
✓ Property ownership structures, joint tenancies, and family-held companies
✓ Beneficiary nominations across EPF, takaful, insurance, and investment accounts

None of these require any specific tax change to make sense. They are sound planning regardless. What an evolving fiscal landscape does is shorten the window in which families can put these arrangements in place calmly, on their own terms — rather than reactively.
Estate planning is one of those decisions where the cost of delay rarely announces itself during the owner's lifetime. It shows up at the worst possible moment, on the people left behind.
The petrol subsidy debate is loud. It is also temporary.

The quieter conversation about how Malaysia funds its future is the one with longer consequences for family wealth.

For families who have been meaning to look at their estate plans — this is a good quarter to actually do it.

Curious to hear how others are thinking about this — has the recent policy direction changed how you're approaching family wealth planning?

For further information please contact:
Email: [email protected]
Phone Number: 03-2166 8830

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24/04/2026

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24/04/2026

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🌙✨ Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri 🌙✨From all of us at Pacific Trustees Berhad , we would like to extend our warmest wishes...
16/03/2026

🌙✨ Selamat Hari Raya Aidilfitri 🌙✨
From all of us at Pacific Trustees Berhad , we would like to extend our warmest wishes to our valued customers, partners, and friends.
May this festive season bring you peace, joy, and prosperity.
Let’s celebrate new beginnings, cherished moments with loved ones, and the spirit of togetherness. 🌸
Wishing you a blessed and joyous Hari Raya! 🌙💚





As the holy month of Ramadan begins, we extend our warmest wishes to you and your loved ones. May this blessed month bri...
19/02/2026

As the holy month of Ramadan begins, we extend our warmest wishes to you and your loved ones. May this blessed month bring peace, joy, and prosperity to your lives.

At Pacific Trustees, we are grateful for the opportunity to serve you and to be part of your journey. Let us embrace the spirit of generosity, reflection, and unity during this sacred time.

From all of us at Pacific Trustees, we wish you a peaceful and fulfilling Ramadan.



🎉✨ Happy Chinese New Year 2026! 🧧🎊As we usher in the Year of the Horse, we wish you strength, progress, prosperity, and ...
06/02/2026

🎉✨ Happy Chinese New Year 2026! 🧧🎊

As we usher in the Year of the Horse, we wish you strength, progress, prosperity, and success in all your endeavors. 🐎

We sincerely thank our partners, clients, and customers for your continued trust and support. We look forward to advancing together with renewed energy and determination in the year ahead.

Wishing you and your loved ones a joyful and prosperous Chinese New Year. 🏮🌟

From our Pacific Trustees family to yours, we wish you a Happy New Year filled with new opportunities, growth, and succe...
31/12/2025

From our Pacific Trustees family to yours, we wish you a Happy New Year filled with new opportunities, growth, and success. May 2026 bring prosperity, inspiration, and memorable moments to you and your loved ones. Let’s make this year extraordinary.

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Unit A-11-8, 11th Floor, Megan Avenue 1, No 189, Jalan Tun Razak, Off Persiaran Hampshire
Kuala Lumpur
50400

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Wednesday 08:45 - 17:45
Thursday 08:45 - 17:45
Friday 08:45 - 17:45

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0321668830

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