BVI Introduces New Reserved Power Trust Legislation

• Published date: 06 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Finance and Banking, Corporate/Commercial Law, Wealth Management, Financial Services, Offshore Financial Centres, Trusts
• Law Firm: O'Neal Webster
• Author: O'Neal Webster and Christopher McKenzie

When trusts in international financial centres are established, settlors will inevitably require a certain level of comfort by ensuring that certain critical powers are reserved by themselves or are granted to others such as protectors. The British Virgin Islands was the first jurisdiction to introduce legislative provisions expressly permitting this and these legislative provisions were contained in section 86 of the Trustee Act which came into force on 1 November 1993. Since then, numerous competitor jurisdictions had introduced legislation in relation to reserved powers and inevitably, given the passage of time, such legislation tended to be somewhat more comprehensive and rather clearer...