Thu, Jul 27, 2017

Offshore Regulators are Increasing their Enforcement Powers

Explore Claire and Sebastien's article "Offshore Regulators are Increasing their Enforcement Powers" in the Global Enforcement Review 2017.
Download the Report

The global view on offshore financial centres remains as volatile as ever. With a seemingly growing concern on the legitimacy of previously accepted tax avoidance measures/schemes across the EU and US, as well as the introduction of requirements to maintain directories of beneficial owners for corporate entities incorporated within the EU1 expected to come into force by the end of June 2017 (and the subsequent extension of such to the UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies2), there is a renewed interest to see what the impact of these requirements will be in practice – particularly insofar as it relates to offshore financial centres.

"Outside of the usual statements in annual reports indicating that AML is to be an area of focus for the year ahead, an additional area of potential interest to note relates to the development of beneficial ownership registers. The governments of the United Kingdom, Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies signed agreements in April 2016 regarding the sharing of information in relation to beneficial ownership."

The Global Enforcement Review (GER) provides analysis and commentary on global enforcement trends in the financial services industry. To compile this report, we studied published data released by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the U.S. Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) of Hong Kong in 2016 and recent years. We have also explored the enforcement trends in various offshore jurisdictions.



Financial Services Compliance and Regulation

End-to-end governance, advisory and monitorship solutions to detect, mitigate, drive efficiencies and remediate operational, legal, compliance and regulatory risk.