The Cypriot AIF: legal forms, types and requirements
The Central Bank of Cyprus has released its latest Investment Funds statistics report indicating that during the second quarter of 2019; the Assets Under Management (AUM) and the reporting entities amounted to almost 5.5 billion EUR and 160 respectively. These numbers indicate the kind of growth the fund sector in Cyprus is experiencing with the reporting entities doubling within 3 years and AUM within 1.5 years.
In our previous article, we discussed how the upgraded AIF framework included a major advancement by introducing the Registered Alternative Investment Funds (RAIFs) — its details and its advantages. One of the major advantages of the RAIFs is the time and costs that can be saved by the fact that they are registered and externally managed by a fund manager and not directly authorized and supervised by CySEC. Therefore, RAIFs automatically gain a European substance for the fund, and the whole procedure for the establishment takes only few weeks’ time — usually at most a month.
It is evident that the provision for RAIFs in the latest legal framework update allowed Cyprus to appear as a more attractive and flexible jurisdiction for funds. For simplicity, in this commentary we are discussing the different Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) legal forms, the available types and their peculiarities.
Read More…
