General Registry has made the names of directors and their alternates of any company incorporated in the Cayman Islands available for inspection as of 1 October.

This information is now available, in addition to other basic company information that has been available for public searches since the 1960s, including company name, the status and type of company, the registered office, the date of registration and the company registration number.   

The initiative has been launched in response to the latest Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) peer reviews of the Cayman Islands, which noted the Cayman Islands did not provide directors names, whereas this is common practice in most other countries. 

The Companies (Amendment) Law 2019 was published in August granting any person the ability to inspect a ‘list of names’ of the current and alternate directors of a Cayman Islands company. In addition, the law was amended to reduce the time within which a Cayman Islands company must notify the Registrar of changes to its directors and officers from 60 to 30 days.

Registrar General Cindy Jefferson-Bulgin elaborated by noting, ‘it has always been the legal responsibility of all directors and service providers to ensure that the directors changes are made in a timely manner and we wish to reiterate the July change in the timeline for providing those updates. Penalties for failure to file changes will apply, as it is extremely important that the Registry database is current’.

Only the names of the directors and their alternates are available for inspection.  No other personal details will be provided, and the searcher must have the correct registered name of the company to execute the search. 

Anyone seeking the names of directors or their alternates of a Cayman entity can request an inspection through credit and debit-card accepting kiosks outside the Registry office, or inside by paying cash at the counter.  The fee is CI$50 per search.  The kiosks have been separated from other Registry databases in alignment with cyber-security best practices. 

A large number of searches are conducted regularly for other basic information and the Registry has prepared in the event that there is a large response to this newly available information.