Originally published in
Captive Insurance Times, October 2012
Fiona Le Poidevin, Chief Executive of Guernsey Finance,
and Richard Paris-Smith, Director, Willis Management Guernsey,
explores how Guernsey is differentiating itself from other offshore
domiciles.
While the island of Guernsey sits closer to the coast of
Normandy than the coast of the England, it is politically deemed to
be a British Crown dependency. This means that the island governs
itself, but should it ever be threatened, the UK would have to
defend its shores. This is where its dependency ends. Guernsey is
capable of making its own decisions, particularly business ones,
and the island has made its own journey into captive insurance. As
a domicile, Guernsey decided against seeking Solvency II
equivalence, which is something that old-captive hand Bermuda, as
well as Japan and Switzerland, did not do, and it pioneered the use
of protected cell companies (PCCs) as alternative risk transfer
models in
