The Long Road to a Beneficial Ownership Regime in the Cayman Islands

This chapter explores the Cayman Islands’ challenges in the implementation of its beneficial ownership regime. This chapter will firstly outline the international imperative for the implementation of a beneficial ownership regime together with the standards of implementation expected of states who wish to compete without sanction on the international financial markets before turning to chart the Cayman Islands’ journey to realising those international norms. This involves an analysis of the Cayman Islands’ initial resistance to beneficial ownership leading to the potential of the United Kingdom imposing a regime on the Cayman Islands by an Order in Council, together with an evaluation of an evolving legal framework devised by the Cayman Islands Government to demonstrate compliance with international standards. Lastly this chapter reaches conclusions as to the efforts of the Cayman Islands to implement a beneficial ownership regime in compliance with international standards and to evaluate the further enhancements to the regime proposed by the Ministry of Financial Services in September 2021. Whilst the Cayman Islands may have had a challenging journey in realising a beneficial ownership regime the lessons it has learned on the journey have ensured that there is now a sophisticated regime in place representing compliance standards far more advanced than many G7 nations.