British Virgin Islands: Offshore Banking

2016 was an incredibly hard year for the hedge fund industry. One industry statistic has suggested that new fund launches were 40% down on 2015, with the number of new funds...

In April 2015 the BVI, the Cayman Islands and certain other jurisdictions were removed from Italy's blacklist of jurisdictions.

The art finance market has seen an unprecedented boom in recent years, buoyed by changing perspectives amongst wealth management players and art collectors.

On 20 July 2011 the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal ("ECCA") handed down the latest decision in the long running case of "Alfa Telecom Turkey Limited v Cukurova Finance International Limited and Cukurova Holdings AS".

The Securities and Investment Business Act 2010 (SIBA) of the British Virgin Islands (BVI), which took effect in May 2010, requires persons engaged in ‘investment business' (as defined below) in or from within the BVI to be licensed thereunder.

The British Virgin Islands (BVI) is a British Overseas Territory and is the world's pre-eminent corporate domicile.

The first quarter of 2007 has been a very good one for the BVI. On the back of a continued golden period for much of the global economy, the BVI continues to boom. The Financial Times Special Report on the BVI, which was published on 9 March, paid a glowing tribute to the way in which the BVI has continued to develop and position itself.

Since trusts governed by the laws of the BVI usually have significant legal links with the laws of one or more other jurisdictions, it is essential for the BVI to have adequate rules for resolving "choice of law" questions relating to trusts.

Since its enactment 20 years ago, the BVI’s International Business Companies Act (Cap. 291) (the "IBC Act") has become one of the most widely-used corporate statutes with over six hundred thousand IBCs incorporated under it. Notwithstanding such phenomenal success, practitioners and users have for some time been calling for amendments to the IBC Act as well as for an additional and more flexible range of corporate vehicles, and its twentieth anniversary marked an appropriate occasion f