The BVI Business Companies Act (No 16 of 2004) is a statute of the British Virgin Islands relating to the formation of all companies in the British Virgin Islands, both offshore companies and local companies. It replaced the extremely popular and highly successful International Business Companies Act.
The decision to replace the International Business Companies Act was driven by two things. Firstly, there was a general perception that the older legislation was becoming a bit dated, and needed modernising. Secondly, the OECD and other multinational organisations had expressed concerns about ring-fenced tax regimes in tax havens, such as that under the older legislation and were putting jurisdictions under pressure to repeal them. The British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission dealt with both issues in a single legislative swoop.
The BVI Business Companies Act is actually based upon a New Zealand statute (as opposed to the International Business Companies Act, which was based on Delaware corporation law). Conscious of how widely the earlier legislation had been copied by other tax havens, the BVI Business Companies Act was drafted with a large number of forms and procedures which specifically tied it into the Territory's regulatory structure, thereby making it much harder to simply copy and enact.
Read more about BVI Business Companies Act: Name, Features, Transitional Arrangements, Amendments, Replications
Famous quotes containing the words business, companies and/or act:
“It is the business of the critic, as of the portrait painter, to synthesize a million glances at his subject that will tell the onlooker at one glance the truth about him, as ultimate as he can get it.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Socialite women meet socialite men and mate and breed socialite children so that we can fund small opera companies and ballet troupes because there is no government subsidy.”
—Sugar Rautbord, U.S. socialite fund-raiser and self-described “trash” novelist. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 2, section 7, by Studs Terkel (1988)
“You are as still as a yardstick. You have a doll’s kiss.
The brain whirls in a fit. The brain is not evident.
I have gone to that same place without a germ or a stroke.
A little solo act that lady with the brain that broke.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)