What To Know About BVI's Regulatory Change For Investment Structures

It was unfortunate that such a fundamental change to the regulatory regime of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) was largely overshadowed due to the twin challenges of the economic substance regime implementation in 2019/2020 and the COVID 19 pandemic in 2020.  Save for structures established for the purposes of a making a single investment, most investment fund structures that fell outside the open-ended fund regime will now be subject to the new regulations and many investment holding structures that may not previously have been considered as 'funds' may warrant some regulatory analysis to ensure that remains the case.

The official registration deadline for any structure caught by the new regulations was 1 July 2020, but it is understood that the BVI's Financial Services Commission may still accept late submissions from affected structures without imposing a financial penalty; however, the window of opportunity to tidy up these structures is fast closing.