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The BVI Business Companies Act (No 16 of 2004) is the principal statute of the British Virgin Islands relating to British Virgin Islands company law, regulating both offshore companies and local companies. It replaced the extremely popular and highly successful International Business Companies Act. It came into force on 1 January 2005. 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,〔Under the old International Business Companies Act, companies were essentially exempt from taxation in the British Virgin Islands.〕 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. ==Name== The name of the statute actually commences with "BVI". That statute is often mistakenly referred to as simply the "Business Companies Act" due to a common misinterpretation that the "BVI" is a description of the jurisdiction of enactment rather than actually part of the name. The letters BVI were deliberately inserted as part of the branding exercise, and it was hoped that companies formed under the new legislations would be referred to as "BVIBCs". This would neatly merge the common acronym under the old legislation ("IBCs") and the common reference used in Hong Kong, the which has the largest geographical concentration of British Virgin Island companies (where they are often referred to simply as: "BVIs"). Ultimately the phrase "BVIBCs" proved to be too much of a mouthful, and in the offshore financial industry, it is more usual to refer to entities formed under the Act as "BCs", or simply "BVI companies". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「BVI Business Companies Act」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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