![]() Many of the firms operating in the BVI contributed to the Hurricane Irma relief fund, with the island’s biggest firm, Harneys, announcing it was donating $200,000 (£140,000) to reconstruction efforts. Meanwhile, the BVI Financial Services Commission opened up its online registry to users outside the islands for the first time, to enable business to keep moving. The BVI Commercial Court temporarily relocated to St Lucia until January 2018 and firms such as Harneys sent litigators to ‘pop-up’ offices to handle hearings. Luckily for the majority, the nature of offshore means that those firms with offices elsewhere in the world had BVI lawyers outside the jurisdiction who were able to pick up the slack. Of the major offshore centres, the British Virgin Islands (BVI) were worst hit and several firms were forced to close down their offices there and put business continuity plans in place. The Paradise Papers leak broke just a month or so after the devastating Hurricane Irma hit the Caribbean. The debate over whether individuals using offshore structures should have to make this public was already raging when the ‘Paradise Papers’ were published, thanks to a requirement in the latest iteration of the EU’s directive on anti-money laundering for national trust registers. Except this time the source of the data was Appleby – one of the world’s largest and most established offshore firms.Īppleby promptly swung into damage limitation mode, asserting in statements that the data published by the ICIJ and its media partners had been hacked – not leaked – and that there was “no evidence of wrongdoing, either on the part of ourselves or of our clients”. The debate over whether individuals using offshore structures should have to make this public was already raging when the ‘Paradise Papers’ were publishedĪnd then, in November last year, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released another huge batch of data sourced from offshore. ![]() Better known as a company formation business rather than one that carried out big corporate deals, the Panamanian firm was a world away from the offshore magic circle. There was a palpable sense that they did not feel they could be associated with Mossack Fonseca. When, in 2016, news broke of a massive leak of data from Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca, the firms that feature in our annual Top 30 Offshore Law Firms did not rush to comment. T he offshore world has had better years.
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