Cayman Islands Responds To Jersey Warning

Robert Lee, Tax-news.com, London

07 September 2000

In an effort to crack down on suspicious transactions on Jersey, the Jersey Financial Services Commission recently issued an Anti-Money Laundering Guidance Update, which gives guidance to the island's financial institutions on doing businesses with fellow offshore financial centres such as Russia and Antigua and Barbuda and warned them to be wary of transactions with companies from the Cayman Islands and Malta because of concerns about money laundering. Malta was not best pleased with the Commission's actions and now the Caymans Islands government has responded to the warning.

The Commission had advised that Jersey's banks and financial businesses can no longer asssume that business introduced from the Cayman Islands has been subject to due diligence and "know your customer" procedures that are equivalent to those in Jersey and thus Jersey institutions should check for themselves that any business is legitimate before accepting it.

The warning stems from the Cayman Islands' inclusion on the Financial Action Task Force list of countries not complying with international efforts to stamp out money laundering, but Jennifer Dilbert, the Caymans' UK government representative, said that since the publication of the FATF list, the jurisdiction had introduced new regulations.

Ms Dilbert stated: 'Cayman is not prepared to comment on actions by any particular jurisdictions in the same way that it would not seek to discredit another jurisdiction with respect to any of the financial initiatives facing banking centres round the world. We consider ourselves a mature, well regulated and important financial jurisdiction. Our approach has been, and will continue to be, to co-operate with other countries and to strive to correct shortcomings in our financial industry.'

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