Cayman Islands Corporations

Michael Alberga explains the corporate structures available to the offshore investor in the Cayman Islands, the most popular of which is the 'exempted company'.

The Cayman Islands, three small islands in the Caribbean, some 30 years ago appreciated that the development of a safe, reliable, attractive home for capital, where it could more productively deploy on a worldwide basis, would be beneficial to growth on a global basis. They created a free market economy from which the invisible power of capital could operate, guided by the visible hand of reasonable regulation. Today, the Cayman Islands is one of the world's largest financial centres. As of June 2007, international assets booked through banks in the Cayman Islands stood at US$1.8 trillion, with most of the world's major banking institutions being represented. There were approximately 8,000 mutual funds, commonly known as hedge funds, most of which were institutional with an asset value in 2006 of over