The government is proposing
significant changes to the four-month-old Dormant Accounts Law following
objections from the financial sector about the new law.
A bill to limit the scope of the
law and make other amendments is being debated in the latest sitting of the
Legislative Assembly, which began today (Wednesday, 24 November).
Premier McKeeva Bush said the
amendments to the controversial legislation were being made after the
government received feedback from financial institutions following the July
passage of the law, which enabled the government to seize accounts which had
been dormant for six years.
Mr. Bush said the government had
consulted 13 financial associations since April about the drafting of the new
law, but only the Cayman Islands Bankers Association had responded. He said
that the government took on board that association’s suggestions when drafting
the law.
The amendments to the law include
expanding the dormancy period of an account from six to seven years; that funds
from private accounts will not be sent to the general revenue of the government
but will be dealt with as trust assets; and eliminating references to financial
institutions, referring instead to the entities that hold dormant accounts as
“account providers”.
In a debate on the proposed bill,
opposition member Alden McLaughlin read from an internal memo, dated 24 August,
2010, from the Financial Services Legislative Committee’s Sub-committee on the
Dormant Accounts Law which described the law, in its original format, was
“flawed, unworkable and would cause irreparable damage”.
Mr. McLaughlin asked why that
sub-committee had been asked to examine the law a month after it had already
been passed into law, to which the premier responded that the Financial
Services Legislative Committee and its sub-committee could not have examined
the bill earlier because it had not existed at the time the members of the
Legislative Assembly voted on its in July.
By early this afternoon
(Wednesday), the bill had received a seconding reading. Two other bills – The
Tax Concessions (Amendment) Bill 2010 and The Evidence (Amendment) Bill 2010 –
were also on the agenda.
Government
officials confirmed that the Strategic Policy Statement, which addresses the
Cayman Islands’ financial position for this year and the upcoming year’s
budgets, is scheduled for tomorrow
[Thursday].
Read Friday’s Caymanian Compass for
more.
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