Paris Forum Plans Standards for Offshore Centres
Tax-news.com
19 September 1999

The Financial Stability Forum, meeting in Paris this week, discussed what standards to set for Offshore Financial Centres, and what sanctions to apply to those centres failing to meet standards. The Financial Stability Forum was set up after global financial wobbles in late 1998 to examine systematic ways of lessening financial volatility, for instance by setting controls on hedge funds. The Forum consists of senior representatives from central banks, finance ministries and financial regulators, and has chosen to include the fashionable subject of offshore centres on its agenda. Following the meeting, Andrew Crockett, General Manager of the BIS, who is Chairman of the Forum, said that there was a high level of political commitment to improving the regulation of offshore centres. Although the Forum has no direct powers to discipline errant IOFCs, there are indirect ways in which a like-minded world financial community could hurt them, such as adverse publicity or the imposition of higher capital adequacy ratios on banks' offshore assets.

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