24/03/22

BERMUDA: Digital assets regulation welcomed.

As published on royalgazette.com, Thursday 24 March, 2022.

The digital assets sector will not escape regulation and taxation, a panellist at the third annual International Tech Summit in Bermuda told attendees.

Carol Pepper is the founder and chief executive officer of New York-based family office and consulting firm Pepper International.

She said: “Any regulation is actually quite welcome from the larger family offices because they don’t want to be caught in something that is suddenly shut down or is shown to be the way that Russia is moving money out of the country — or whatever it might be.

“So there’s a lot of risks — there is sort of the very libertarian wing of Bitcoiners who just say, ‘Well, we don’t want any regulation, we just want to do whatever we want to do’.

“But the more conservative, larger, single-family offices are sceptical of that.

“We don’t really think that we’ll ever get to the point where there is no regulation and you can just move all the money around the world without impunity. That’s not really where we see the world going.

“We do see it going more toward having some sort of regulatory environment and, if it is to survive, it needs to be taxable.

“You need to be able to tax in the various jurisdictions because the governments of the world, who still have all the bombs and the weapons, are not going to let us have a shadow economy, with no taxes, getting too large and too out of control.

“It’s just not practical — it’s not going to happen.”

Brian Tehako is the chief investment officer at Warwick Capital Management Ltd, the Bermudian-based digital asset hedge fund manager whose flagship offering is the Horseshoe Bay Fund.

He said Warwick and investors take comfort in Bermuda’s regulatory regime governing digital assets.

“It’s giving our investors a safe feeling that they know we are here and based in Bermuda with that regulatory framework behind us that Bermuda has provided.

“So they have done a great job in the infrastructure they are building here, and the community — it’s great.

“When we looked at it, there isn’t a lot of places that are doing that.”