MBR_ISSUE 41_Cover_LOW

Malta Business Review
TALKING POINT
the difference between tax evasion and tax
avoidance.” Shimmin also notes that offshore
centres deal less and less with tax. “Increasing
life expectancy means that people in their
nineties can have children in their seventies
who do not need inherited wealth and so
trusts are being used to preserve family assets
for younger generations. Charitable trusts and
foundations are also becoming more popular.
These trends are not tax driven particularly
where charities are concerned, which makes
it difficult to condemn everything offshore
as morally bad. We also see structures being
put in place by individuals where they are
concerned that their beneficiaries are not
financially sophisticated, subject to undue
influence or have special needs.”
BVI gets a BOSS
Rathmell says that outside of the media
diatribes there is a considered, intelligent,
and measured effort to improve financial
crime regulation around the world. “In the
UK, one of the most recent examples with
a knock-on effect for the offshore world is
the implementation of the EU’s Fourth Anti-
Money Laundering Directive.” Rathmell
explains that this resulted last year in the
2017 Money Laundering Regulations,
which brought some important changes.
The personal nature of the
leaked documents provided a
lot of media fodder and some
additional investigations, but
the real battle against financial
crime is being fought on a
different turf.
One of the latest rounds of improvements
in the fight against financial crime has been
the introduction of enhanced beneficial
ownership information requirements,
which directly impacts offshore jurisdictions.
“In the BVI, for example, on 30 June 2017,
laws came into effect requiring registered
agents to keep databases of the name,
date of birth, nationality and address of
beneficial owners of corporate and legal
entities. This information is searchable by
BVI authorities via the Beneficial Ownership
Secure System (BOSS).”
According to Rathmell, all of these changes
were born from developments preceding
and independent of the Paradise and Panama
Papers breaches. “The personal nature of the
leaked documents provided a lot of media
fodder and some additional investigations,
but the real battle against financial crime is
being fought on a different turf. Condemning
all offshore jurisdictions, structures, or the
people that use them as criminals or “dodgy”
does not help that battle. This has been
the most unfortunate effect of both of the
‘Papers’,” says Rathmell.
He concludes: “The antidote is for all of us
who work in the industry to show that we
take financial crime seriously, and to continue
to educate the public about the many useful
reasons for the use of offshore structures,
which accounts for the motivations of the
vast majority of our clients and other offshore
account holders.” MBR
Credits: Citywealth Weekly
Continued from pg 8
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