Labuan - A Southeast Asian Treasure

One of the great joys of the roving consultant on captive and cell captive issues is the ability to view, dispassionately, the development and offerings of various financial services jurisdictions. Simplistically there are the good, the bad and the ugly. There are few jurisdictions that have not, at some stage of their development, come under ill-informed scrutiny. In some cases that ill-informed scrutiny reflects the reality of the situation while in others it is because the scrutiny has come too early in the development of the financial centre. In the case of Labuan, few, myself included, appreciated that Labuan is not an offshore centre (other than in the purely geographical sense) and there is far more to it than get to Kuala Lumpur and then fly East for two hours.