A Crash Course in Offshore Financial Centers

SOURCE: OffshoreAlert

MIAMI, FL: February 20, 2007

It is a common misconception among residents of major countries that all offshore financial centers are the same or, at the very least, similar.

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. There are significant differences in the types of business that are transacted, the infrastructure, the legal system, and the quality of regulation.

Bermuda, for example, is the world’s third largest insurance and reinsurance market, despite the fact that it has a population of just 65,000 people crammed onto a land area of only 21-square-miles.

The Cayman Islands specializes in banking and investing and it is by far and away the most popular domicile for hedge funds.

The British Virgin Islands, meanwhile, is the king of company incorporations. As of September, 2005, there were 678,362 International Business Corporations registered in the BVI – that’s 30 IBCs for every one of the country’s 22,500 residents! Virtually none of these entities has a physical presence on the island, existing merely as pieces of paper in the filing cabinets of corporate service providers.

Then there are bottom-feeder jurisdictions like Grenada, which is the place to go if you are looking to commit investment and banking fraud, provided you have a generous budget for bribing and corrupting the local politicians and civil servants, that is!

Another common misconception among residents of major countries is that OFCs are impregnable fortresses when it comes to finding out information about individuals and businesses who conduct business in them, particularly if the investigation was into tax evasion.

These days, every OFC has legal gateways that allow civil and criminal investigators to pierce the corporate veil of anonymity and discover the identities of beneficial owners of legal entities. Many OFCs, including Bermuda, the Isle of Man, Jersey, and Switzerland, even have on-line databases of their corporate registries, some of which can be searched for free.

The information is there and gettable – provided you know how to work the system and have the time and the money to do so: one thing that has not changed about OFCs is that they are still extremely expensive places to do business in.

The offshore financial world is a fascinating place, capitalism at its purest, offering an array of products and services, with everything from the extremely complicated and sophisticated designed by the super-bright to the extremely dubious and silly designed by conmen.

In order to find you way around, you need an accurate road-map. With that in mind, OffshoreAlert’s editor, David Marchant, will present a 75-minute session entitled ‘A Crash Course in Offshore Financial Centers’ at the 5th OffshoreAlert Financial Due Diligence Conference, which is being held in Miami, Florida on April 24-25, 2007.

David will tell you what you need to know about OFCs but won’t read in promotional material. His presentation will look at why OFCs exist, products and services that are on offer, important reputational and regulatory differences between the jurisdictions, and sources of information, including a searchable database containing hundreds of international requests for judicial assistance that contain specific details about on-going criminal investigations.

More information about this and other topics to be discussed at the 5th OffshoreAlert Due Diligence Conference can be viewed online at http://www.kycnews.com/conferences/OACV/agenda.asp.