JERSEY financial institutions have been asked to accommodate new requirements when the International Monetary Fund make their assessment in October.
The procedural changes, announced last week, mean that Jersey and the other offshore centres will from now on be assessed in the same way as onshore centres, instead of separately.
The IMF gives two reasons for integrating all financial services into one Financial Centre Assessment Programme: firstly, the way they want to ‘eliminate the need to maintain a potentially discriminatory list’; and secondly, to allocate IMF resources more effectively by concentrating on ‘the small number of OFCs that account for the overwhelming volume of offshore activity and could be expected to pose major financial system risks’.
That ‘priority’ list includes Bermuda, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Panama, Labuan, the Bahamas, Cayman and possibly the British Virgin Islands. These will continue to be assessed every five to seven years. Martin de Forest Brown, director of international finance at the Chief Minister’s Office (pictured), said that the integration of offshore and onshore assessment was ‘a really good result’ for the industry. ‘
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