Features

Like many International Offshore Financial Centres (IOFCs), the British Virgin Islands has had to adapt its legislative framework to survive in the increasingly competitive world of offshore and within the ever-tightening straightjacket of transparency demands from the OECD and other multilateral groups. So, in this feature we look at how the BVI is rising to meet these challenges, exploring key aspects of its offshore financial services regime.

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With their flexible company laws and low levels of taxation, the United Kingdom Crown Dependencies of Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man continue to provide a conduit for international companies intending to raise capital on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and its junior markets despite the uncertain economic environment, demonstrating the importance of these offshore financial centres to the City of the London and the UK economy as a whole.

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Despite the weak economic climate, demand from wealthy individuals and company executives for yachts and the services associated with running and maintaining these assets remains strong.

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A tropical paradise in the centre of the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles has successfully transitioned from an agricultural to a services-based economy within which tourism dominates. However, the government has actively encouraged the development of offshore financial services, and the finance industry now constitutes the ‘third pillar’ of the economy.

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As one of the first British dependent territories to develop tax-exempt corporate forms, Gibraltar has a long history as an offshore financial centre, with the focus initially on the traditional forms of offshore business like company incorporation, banking, investment holding, shipping and trust management. The arrival of the internet however has seen the jurisdiction develop into one of the world’s foremost e-gaming and gambling company domiciles.

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Life for the average expat can be challenging enough, what with acclimatising to a new culture, overcoming language barriers, dealing with foreign bureaucracies, worrying if your money is safe in the local bank, fretting about whether the kids will settle into their new school – the list could go on for quite some length. However, there is one very important factor that we haven’t mentioned – and one which could bring even the most savvy expat into a cold sweat at the mere thought of - and that is the dreaded ‘t’ word. Yes, you’ve guessed it, tax.

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In a globalized world, where ever-increasing volumes of trade and investment are being conducted with little regard to national borders and huge sums of money can be transmitted around the earth at the press of a button, the demand for international companies, often located in offshore jurisdictions, has probably never been higher.

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So far at least, the economic fallout from the debt crisis which is acting as a drag on many of the world’s major economies does not seem to be affecting the world of offshore, with many key jurisdictions having reported increases in business activity in 2011.

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With its low tax, business friendly ‘E-Zone’ legislation, advanced telecommunications infrastructure, and sophisticated business environment, the Caribbean island of Curaçao is now a very attractive proposition for e-commerce companies looking to locate operations or back-up facilities in the Americas region.

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Petroleum has traditionally dominated the economy of the UAE. At one time an underdeveloped area, by 1985 the region had the highest per capita income in the world. This immense wealth has been invested in huge infrastructure projects in all seven of the emirates. It has also allowed the government to keep taxes low (in most cases, practically non-existent) which has attracted thousands of corporate investors and millions of foreign workers and investors into the country, resulting in some of the highest pre-crisis economic growth rates anywhere in the world.

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With the seemingly endless conveyor belt of budgets, supplementary budgets, crisis budgets and solidarity budgets being announced in various parts of Europe as governments in the European Union, and indeed, worldwide, struggle to come to terms with the eurozone crisis, it is understandable that several budget announcements in key offshore jurisdictions which have been announced over the past few weeks have rather blipped off the radar undetected.

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Imagine a situation in which you owe back taxes to another country even though you no longer live there, work there or haven’t earned so much as a dime there in several years, and then, to add insult to financial injury, you were required to pay swingeing non-compliance penalties on top of these. Most people would respond that, if there was any natural justice in the world, such a scenario would not be allowed to happen. But, as many American expats in Canada are discovering to their horror, it most certainly is, and such cases highlight the lengths to which nationals of some countries must go to finally sever ties with the tax man in the land of their birth.

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In an increasingly competitive and globalized world, international offshore financial centres rarely stop evolving and adapting to new circumstances and economic realities, and perhaps one of the most innovative, but lesser known, jurisdictions of recent times has been the Malaysian island of Labuan, which continues to go from strength to strength, despite the testing global economic conditions.

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Located favourably in the Mediterranean, and a member of the European Union since 2004, Malta has a number of advantages which make it attractive to businesses both large and small, including a skilled and internationally-facing workforce, an advantageous tax regime, nevertheless developed with an eye to global standards in this area, and a flexible and cost-effective company formation regime.

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Offshore, despite becoming something of a dirty word in the last decade or so due to an on-going crackdown by the OECD, and certain nations within it, against ‘harmful’ tax regimes and secrecy laws, is actually in a pretty healthy condition as thousands of companies from Europe to North America and Asia continue to legitimately utilize the various laws and company structures available in the dozens of international offshore financial centres (IOFCs) scattered around the globe to minimize tax.

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