A decision on whether the US tax authorities should have been given information on money manager Terry Coxon's on-Island financial affairs will be made today.

Mr. Coxon is a financial writer who claimed to have the offshore answer to protecting wealth that would make "lawsuit predators weep".

The US tax authorities are pursuing a $1.5 million liability against him and his company Passport Financial Incorporated, which has a bank account here.

Earlier in the year the Supreme Court decided that Finance Minister Paula Cox had jurisdiction to handle a request by US tax authorities to seek information under the USA Bermuda Tax Convention Act about Mr. Coxon.

Bermuda does provide such information to outside countries if a good case is made for the request.

The court further accepted the Finance Minister had followed the procedure set out in the Act regarding Mr. Coxon and Passport Financial Incorporated, which was set up in 1993 in order to publish "informational materials" on international investments.

Last week Mr. Coxon's lawyer, Mark Diel, argued in the Appeals Court that because the company did not reside in the US, was not a US tax payer or US citizen, the authorities should not have been granted permission to look into its financial affairs.

He also argued that it was a back door attempt to gain access to Mr. Coxon's US clients' financial information, because the request only specified information about US clients and not clients elsewhere in the world.

But Government lawyer John Kessaram said the Minister could not have known the company's status without conducting an investigation herself, and said she worked within the confines of the Act and took the information supplied by the US authority in good faith.

Mr. Coxon wrote the book "Keep What You Earn" and until recently wrote on various financial web-sites.

"Repackage your assets to make them difficult or virtually impossible for a future lawsuit to reach them," he recommended in a series of articles for the Free Market News Network.

And on his own now defunct Passport Financial web-site, he said: "Place your wealth beyond easy reach of anyone who might want to sue you. When you transfer your assets to the Trust, the Trust owns them, not you, thus you can't be forced to hand them over to the victor of a lawsuit."

Appearing to follow his own advice, Mr. Coxon moved $500,000 to the Cayman Islands before a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation — and its $1.5m liability order — reached its conclusion in 2003, US court documents state.

He set up a "Passport Trust" in the name of his late mother Patricia, of which $500,000 has been argued through the US courts as being his own personal asset.

Bermuda is now involved because Mr. Coxon is an officer and director of Passport Financial (Cayman) which gives advice to offshore institutions in Bermuda and also has a bank account in Bermuda. The presence of money belonging to Mr. Coxon is of interest to the US tax authorities seeking the full $1.5m liability order made by SEC.