In this special article for Business News Charles Coleman of Keystone Law in the Isle of Man described his recent visit to a conference in Miami.

May again, and that means that once again I was lumbered with travelling to Miami and the Ritz Carlton for the 17th Annual Offshore Alert Conference (the things I do for a few CPD points!).

This year I was the only Isle of Man based attendee and so it fell to me to fly the flag for the Isle of Man and the efforts made in this jurisdiction to combat financial fraud and the methods used in the island to identify, freeze and recover assets derived from fraud.

As always it was a pleasure to see friends, colleagues and clients from all over the US, Caribbean and beyond and to discuss the latest developments in asset tracing, insolvency and fraud recovery with them.

As always, there were some interesting points to take away, in particular from a panel discussion on the Trump administration’s attitude to the offshore financial centres.

The general perception from the US practitioners and insiders appears to be that successive administrations have ’deprioritised’ FATCA and the Trump administration is likely to continue in that vein.

Given the significant efforts that the island and its businesses have gone to to ensure FATCA compliance, this is a little surprising, but hopefully the view from the US will trickle through and might bring some perspective to the issue of compliance going forward.

Ed Davis, Miami based asset tracer and founder of Sequor Law was part of a very interesting panel discussion on asset tracing in high net worth divorces.

Financial sophistication is the rule rather than the exception when dealing with the very wealthy and so the issue of financial disclosure in matrimonial proceedings takes on a new dimension.

Due to complex asset holding structures very often spouses are unaware of the exact scale of the matrimonial assets, making improper non disclosure of assets in the proceedings (and therefore under-settlement for the spouse) a real possibility.

The panel discussed developments in the law on when and how incriminating documents obtained or preserved by the petitioning spouse prior to the issue of matrimonial proceedings can be deployed.

An example was given where a husband had buried documents evidencing significant foreign assets and trusts in the garden (which the wife dug up and copied while he was out, then reburied them, before suing for divorce).

The general panel view was that there is almost always a metaphorical ’box in the garden’, if not a physical one.

There have been numerous reports of cases and settlements being re-opened years later as a result of prior non-disclosure as to assets in the proceedings so it is obvious that such non-disclosure in these high net worth divorces is not uncommon. Watch this space.

There was also a panel discussion regarding lessons learned from the case of the US vs the Billionaire Wyly brothers - as an example of successfully pursuing assets offshore.

Given that I acted for the SEC and the IRS in that case I was particularly keen to hear the panel’s views on this $400m fraud which had substantive proceedings in a number of parts of the US and limbs in both the Isle of Man and Cayman.

The IRS also presented on efforts made to enforce against tax evaders misusing the offshore jurisdictions, which outlined the progress they are making and the jurisdictions they see as problematic.

As always, the Offshore Alert conference was a broad church and various NGOs were also in attendance and it was good to hear the difficulties they see with the Offshore Financial Centres.

Often they are ahead of the regulators and law enforcement in spotting abuses so their input is always valuable, if only to see where regulators might make moves in the future.