Geoff Cook, the chief executive of Jersey Finance (an arm of the island protectorate's international financial centre) is in the UAE promoting his offshore locale. He sees the Middle East as important to Jersey for a couple of reasons: first, because it serves as a "tax-neutral" place for wealthy families to station their assets (a well-developed legal structure for executing estates and enforcing succession planning makes it attractive, he says). Second, because it provides Middle Eastern companies with a nice conduit for acquiring assets in Europe. When you buy a portfolio of assets through Jersey, he says, you get better tax treatment - and much less bureaucratic hassle - than you would dealing directly with varying regulatory regimes all over the continent
"You tend to find investors use banking centres according to where their wealth is," he said. "If they are buying European assets, they will do that in the European centres."
Cook said Jersey hasn't been affected in a major way by the global financial crisis, as its financial operations are concentrated in trusteeships and asset management, neither of which has taken a death-knell-level hit during the past year. While it never made up a large slice of Jersey's financial pie, though, the offshore securitisation business has basically ground to a halt.
Overall, Cook sounded pretty bullish about the Middle East. He said some Jersey companies had even developed Sharia-compliant structures aimed squarely at investors in the region. He also spoke of a "cultural affinity" between the Middle East and Europe: many wealthy families in the region go on holiday and send children to school in Europe. He's even
considering opening up a local office somewhere in the region -
probably in Bahrain, Dubai or Abu Dhabi.