Obviously. That is why they exist. The entire point of shell companies, shell trusts and so on is to hide trade secret.

When private citizens do it seems weird but when companies do it then it is rather expected thing to do in market - in fact, I don't think markets could function without them, they are so ingrained part of it that removal of them would only hurt global market. There are so many reasons for a company to use them such as if you want to hide stuff from your competitors or from your customers and so on. Sometimes having all the information public about all of your failed and successful business attempts or your real allies or which other company you are actually making trades with might not be the best thing since people are idiots and jump to conclusions and can hurt your very own business by forming opinions based on the data they see.

Take a simple transaction of doing business with some company that has ton of negativity among the people, the act alone would only hurt the your company too and thus it needs to be hidden from everyone. You can't trust government with it, even if they promise to never reveal it, especially considering their track record of keeping things private. That shit simply doesn't happen. Government is too exposed and everybody has eyes in them, so they are massive security hole in the entire market system.

Personally, you don't really have to use offshore shells, since in many ways you can hide stuff in your own country too. Essentially building a network of startups (which is basically what a shell company is) can achieve the same goal as to blindly trusting some other company in other country with things you want to hide from this world. Sometimes, especially in matters of trade secrets, it is best to keep that information close rather than far away so your enemies could take a peak without your knowledge.

Last but not least, hating off shore shells purely of bad rep doesn't fix shit. I could just as easily use some other schemes to evade or avoid taxes that work far better than offshore shells. So removing them improves nothing, it would just make some ignorant people happy until they find out about the other and more popular schemes that have nothing to do with going 'offshore'.