Although we are generally very positive about New Zealand as an offshore financial centre (I particularly like New Zealand trusts for Asset Protection planning) we are becoming slightly concerned about the way it is being used by some parties. We’ve recently warned on the Q Wealth blog and elsewhere about Hatfield Oak International. And there are numerous other companies out there doing similar things.

The following was received from a reputable incorporator in New Zealand with whom we have worked for some years… and I quote:

Several other companies providing NZ incorporations by misleading people into thinking that the company has been set up in a legally tax free way. In some cases there are breaches of the Companies Act apparent where an Auditor has not been appointed (even though foreign ownership is greater than the 24% level). In other cases clients are being sold ordinary companies with no Constitution as being Financial Institutions. We see incorrect name usage. We see websites making false claims on Licensing. We see an Asian company making false residence claims in connection with Registered Office and place for service of documents. We have recently been contacted by a number of professional clients who are asking to change these companies to our services as they have learned that they were in breach of NZ regulations.

Unfortunately, we are not able to take on most of these companies as to do so would be very dangerous to our business and existing clients. The best that we can do is to form a new company with a similar name and transfer the assets / business of the former company to the new company. We are also concerned that breaches of the current regulations will force a review of the regulations with good clients having to contend with greater compliance (and costs arising). If we can see these obvious breaches without going looking for them we are sure that the Authorities will also have seen them.

So, if you want to put your money in one of these unlicensed New Zealand financial institutions, don’t say that Peter Mac didn’t warn you…!

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It’s been an open secret for the last 6-12 months that many beneficial owners of offshore corporations have not been paying their annual taxes and fees. This is not a good idea as it puts the whole structure at risk and the IBC ceases to be in good standing.

However I was quite surprised to receive this from our resident agent in St Kitts and Nevis:

22nd May 2009

To : Company Director(s)

Ref : Government annual renewal fees

Dear All,

The St.Christopher (St.Kitts) and Nevis  Financial Services Regulatory
Department has announced new initiatives with respect to the payment
annual renewal fees for companies that are in arrears.

The incentive offers company director(s) the option to settle arrears of
annual company fees over a period of 12 months, commencing with the
company’s annual renewal date,

Please take advantage of this most welcome offer to bring your company
in Good Standing and keep your company current on the register.

Best regards and feel free to call on us.

I suppose the St Kitts government are to be congratulated on their flexibility, but I frankly find it rather unlikely that this will benefit anyone unless they have dozens or hundreds of St Kitts and Nevis IBCs.  Imagine the wire transfer fees involved in making a payment each month…

St Kitts of course is more famous for its tax-free residence and economic citizenship program, which offers a second passport in just a few months in return for a condo purchase in the island nation.

It’s interesting to note that Panama is still the only jurisdiction that does not automatically strike companies off the register after a time on the grounds of non-payment of franchise taxes.

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Guest post for petermacfarlane.net by Terry Coxon, Editor, The Casey Report

We don’t yet know how many trillions will be swallowed up by the government’s rapidly breeding herd of stimulus-bailout-help!help! measures. But additional bold steps are sure to come, some already in R&D and others to be invented on the fly to answer each new wave of bad news. Expect price tags suitable for proving how serious and determined the authors are.

The doubts that meet each new plan – does it really need to be that big… hasn’t something like that been tried before… is it smart to keep wrong-headed decision makers in high places… isn’t too much debt at the heart of the problem… if you don’t know what causes inflation, are you sure you know what causes babies – are all answered with the same rhetorical question: “We can’t just do nothing, can we?”

Yes, we can. But we won’t, because the decisions about our wealth and our freedom are being made by career politicians, for whom stepping aside is the only truly unacceptable plan. Nonetheless, even though the idea of government doing nothing in the face of credit crisis, bank insolvencies, and recession has been reduced to a hypothetical, such a policy deserves a little exploring, since it can tell us something about where all the big-dollar solutions coming out of Washington are likely to lead.

Background

It’s possible to train people to be crazy. If you’re acquainted with a psychotherapist (socially, of course), ask him to explain how it’s done. Training people to be crazy wasn’t what the U.S. government set out to do when it ended the dollar’s convertibility to gold in 1973. But it turned out to be one of the results.

Untethered from the gold standard, the Federal Reserve was free to create new dollars whenever it saw fit. But the policy it drifted into wasn’t steady inflation, day in and day out, it was rescue inflation. The Fed would step up the expansion of the money supply whenever it saw a risk of widespread defaults in credit markets. The unintended effect was to train both lenders and borrowers, by repeatedly rescuing them from damaging defaults, to appraise financial risk unrealistically and to regard what is in fact a source of danger as a manageable nuisance. It made the managers of financial institutions functionally crazy, and the longer rescue inflation continued, the worse they got. (When you read about investment bankers running a business with 30-to-1 leverage and tell yourself, “Those people must be crazy,” you’ve got it about right. But they weren’t born that way. They were trained.)

That’s how the credit crisis was nurtured. And here is what the government has done about it so far.

• August 2007. The credit crisis is just going public. Commercial banks, investment banks, and other financial institutions are waking up to the reason they were getting such great returns on junk paper – it really is junk. To ease the shock, the Federal Reserve begins a vast and unprecedented program of swapping out Treasury securities from its own sizeable (nearly $1 trillion) investment portfolio in exchange for the embarrassing and worrisome securities that seem to be paralyzing the lending departments of the banks that own them. A novel approach, and not really inflationary, since no new cash is produced.

• September 2008. Lehman Brothers informs the Federal Reserve that the novel approach, admirable though its inventiveness might be, isn’t working and drops dead in front of Ben Bernanke’s desk. The Fed abandons the hope of a non-inflationary remedy and begins a vast and unprecedented program of expanding the monetary base (buying Treasury securities and other IOUs in the open market with brand-new dollars).

• October 2008. President Bush signs a vast ($700 billion) and unprecedented bailout bill. It has been sold to Congress as a measure to help banks survive and keep lending, but the details are vague in the extreme, leaving the secretary of the Treasury with the authority to use the money for almost anything, including, if he should find it advisable, “for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage; but nobody to know what it is.”

Other vast and unprecedented programs have followed, including tens of billions for any car company willing to drive (not fly) to the teller window, hundreds of billions to get messy home mortgages house-trained, and unspecified mega-billions for Timothy Geithner’s proposal to unburden banks of bad assets through a plan of great advantage but nobody to know what it is.

And today, 21 months after the doctors started scribbling prescriptions, most markets continue down, the economy is still shrinking, and worries are still growing.

Now roll the tape back to August 2007. What would have happened if the U.S. government had simply kept its long-standing commitments (in particular, protecting FDIC-insured deposits and preventing the money supply from shrinking) and otherwise had done nothing? No good-asset-for-bad-asset swaps, no wild expansion in the monetary base, no bailouts, no arranged marriages with taxpayer-financed dowries for failing institutions.

Nothing.

If that sounds extreme, perhaps you’ll find it a little more acceptable if I put it this way: what would have happened if George Bush, Ben Bernanke, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, and Barack Obama had done nothing?

It would have been spectacular, a mass die-off of the incautious. Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, and other practitioners of ultra leverage, including perhaps Merrill Lynch, would have folded. When you borrow to carry $30 of investments for each $1 of company capital, it only takes a 3.4% drop in the prices of your assets to put you under water. And when you’re getting that 30-to-1 leverage through overnight borrowing, even a whiff of doubt can make it impossible to roll over your financing from one day to the next. Either way, you’re out of business.

From there, the trouble would have fanned out. The firms just pronounced dead were counterparties to trillions of dollars in derivatives. The investors on the other side of all those deals (largely banks, insurance companies, and other brokers) would have been left holding the bag. Some of them would have failed, and all that survived would have been left weakened and living in fear.

Growing mortgage losses would have forced Fannie and Freddie (and also Countrywide Financial) into bankruptcy, which would have turned their trillions in outstanding bonds into junk debt, doing great injury to the banks, insurance companies, and other investors that held them. Citibank and Wachovia would have gone under. And with Fannie, Freddie, and Countrywide gone, the biggest sources of mortgage money would be unavailable, which would have turned the housing market from a corpse into a mutilated corpse. AIG, which had turned itself into a sink of follies by insuring other companies against losses on junk debt, would also have joined the departed – and the companies that had been depending on AIG credit insurance would have gotten sorted out between the failed and the merely damaged.

Bank of America, having been spared the irresistible invitations to acquire Countrywide and Merrill Lynch, might be in much better shape than it is today.

With a hundred-car pile-up in the financial sector, lending to businesses and consumers would have shriveled, and the rest of the economy would have slipped into a depression. No more General Motors. No more Chrysler. Ford maybe.

And those are just the big names. Tens of thousands of other companies would have gone out of business. Most others would have laid off workers. The unemployment rate would have moved deep into double digits. With so many companies cutting inventories to raise cash for survival, the wholesale price index would have gone off a cliff, and the consumer price index also would have slumped.

It’s an ugly picture, with pain and hardship for millions of people and grave worries for the rest. But before you start preparing thank-you notes for the good people in Washington who’ve acted so boldly, consider this:

If they had done nothing, the whole sorry business might be over by now. Without the promise of rescue and blow-softening, events would have moved quickly. The collapse of the overleveraged financial companies would have started soon after credit market jitters began in August 2007. (Leverage built on overnight borrowing invites swift justice.) The disaster in the financial sector might have been over by the end of that year or soon after. The year 2008 would have seen the wave of layoffs and bankruptcies in operating companies and the fall in wholesale and consumer prices.

A simple process would have brought the contraction to an end. With the prices of most things falling, the real value of the money in everyone’s pocket would be rising. That would continue until large segments of the population came to feel cash rich and started spending. Dollars appreciated in value, not dollars newly printed, would finance the recovery.

And it would be a thoroughly healthy recovery, because the bankruptcy proceedings that came before it would remove the billion-dollar bunglers of recent years from positions where they can make expensive mistakes. Decision making about the allocation of capital would fall to the survivors, who, by their survival, had proven their ability and readiness to decide wisely.

There is precedent for this. In the depression of 1920-1921, for example, wholesale prices fell by nearly one half, and most of that fall occurred in a period of just six months. It was a violent experience, with widespread bankruptcies, but it was over in a year and a half. It ran fast because the government did so little to try to stop it. Nancy Pelosi hadn’t been born yet.

So much for the hypothetical. Instead, with all the government efforts to make things right, we have:

• An economy that continues to contract;
• A continuing mystery as to which banks are solvent and which are not;
• Financial institutions still under the control of individuals who’ve proven they should be doing something else;
• Car companies on apparently permanent life-support at taxpayer expense;
• A retarded decline in housing prices that is extending, by years, uncertainty as to how severe mortgage losses are going to be;
• A flock of new government programs that will continue to soak up billions of dollars per year long after the recession is over;
• A vast and unprecedented (that again) increase in the basic money supply, which is jet fuel for price inflation;
• A vast and unprecedented increase in peacetime government borrowing, which, when the recovery begins, will trap the government in a choice between letting interest rates rise (and risk choking off the recovery) and continuing to inflate the money supply (and kiss runaway price inflation on the mouth).

Yes, it does seem cruel to do nothing when disaster is unfolding. But consider the likely consequences of the alternative.

Doing nothing might be appropriate for Washington at this point in time… but it is not what you should do as an investor. Making the trend your friend is the strategy that will get you through tough economic times like this and provide you double- and triple-digit returns.

The Casey Report focuses on emerging trends to profit from even in highly volatile markets – whether it’s shorting stocks squarely in the way of the accelerating economic avalanche or investing in commodities that stand to gain big in the coming months. Test it now risk-free with our 3-month, 100% money-back trial… click here to learn more.

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I don’t know if Friday the 13th followed by Valentine’s Day is the cause of so much excitement in the Offshore World this weekend. No sooner did Q Wealth Report publish my blog entry on the lessons to be learned from the UBS Swiss banking case (in a nutshell the advice was not to do business with offshore banks that have a presence in the USA) than news comes in to reinforce just what I was saying.

“It’s not a Friday afternoon cocktail any more. It’s taking off the gloves. We have a job to do to protect our jurisdiction.” Those are the words of Antigua’s banking regulator talking yesterday about Stanford International Bank. Stanford is an offshore bank owned by the flamboyant Texan billionaire of the same surname, who is also the biggest foreign investor on the island of Antigua. His other business interests in the US and the Caribbean include airlines, hotels and controversial cricket tournaments!

I won’t repeat the news on Stanford because you can read the full story in Business Week’s article Antigua Takes a Look at Stanford Bank. The International Herald Tribune also published a piece that goes into more depth called Scrutiny of Stanford’s bank spreads to Caribbean.

Stanford Group has long targeted American citizens along with wealthy Latin Americans (Venezuelans for example) and is now accused of taking unnecessary risks to pay rates of return above market average on Certificates of Deposit. By the way, Stanford Group also owns a bank in Panama, Stanford Bank S.A. and a second bank in Antigua known as – drumroll! – Bank of Antigua. Not forgetting either Stanford Bank Venezuela, a Venezuelan commercial bank. They also own a coin and bullion dealership. But, like the Marc Harris Organisation ten years ago that I wrote about just a few days ago following a CNBC documentary that visited Panama, Stanford Bank is one of those organizations that my readers and clients don’t usually hear about because I simply didn’t feel comfortable with them. My motto is “you don’t know until you go.” I went – and now I know.

Stanford’s head offices are quite a sight to behold for anyone flying in to our out of Antigua (most likely on a plane partly owned by Stanford), taking up virtually the whole Airport Boulevard. And Stanford certainly don’t spare expenses when it comes to trying to impress clients.  I have also visited a couple of other of their offices in Latin America, which are decorated according to the Marriott school of interior design.

However, when I talked to and visited Stanford Bank I found their staff plain arrogant. There I was, walking in as a potential client who could bring a lot of business to them, and they made me feel like they were doing me a favor by taking the time to talk to me.  So I simply decided to pass on that opportunity and steer my consulting clients in the direction of other, more discreet and low profile private banks in more traditional havens in Europe.

Stanford’s US presence, however, was always my major concern – just like with UBS. Wealthy individuals do business with offshore banks for privacy and security. An offshore bank headquartered in the USA cannot offer either of those two things. Unfortunately wealthy Latin Americans, in particular, still tend to look at the US as a bastion of security. Big mistake.

I was not over impressed by the Antiguan banking scene generally. There are some good offshore banks in the Caribbean region, and there are many banks still based in Antigua, but I certainly did not find any worthy of recommending. That’s why you are only reading my opinions of Antigua and Stanford Bank now that you might be interested for other reasons.

If you are interested in my recommendations for secure, conservative offshore banks – whether for private banking services or for international commercial banking services – I can do no better than refer you to my Practical Offshore Banking Guide 2009 that is available for instant download to members of The Q Wealth Report. Q Wealth Report is a small but powerful private membership organization dedicated to asset protection, offshore banking, wealth creation and the search to regain lost financial privacy for sovereign individuals.

And remember that lesson I mentioned at the beginning of this little piece. The ground rule is not to do business with any bank that has offices in either the USA or your home country!

Signing off from somewhere offshore, this is Peter Macfarlane wishing you lots of love on Valentine’s Day!

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Last night I finally got to watch a TV show that has already aired a few times on CNBC’s American Greed series entitled “Revolutionary Guru of Greed”. Besides some nice shots of Panama City, it talked about the crazy offshore guru Marc Harris who is now in a Federal Corrections Institution (Club Fed) in Fort Worth, Texas. An interesting reminder of what not to do if you go offshore!

I first met Marc Harris at a seminar in London, where I always remember him being rather peeved that he had to pay for his own conference room, as if that was some kind of insult. Harris had some excellent ideas – basically his plan was to put offshore banking and investing within the reach of the masses, or shall we say the middle classes. He was keen on the Perpetual Traveler theory. Many of the same ideas I write about today in fact, though e was more than a decade ahead of me. I liked his ideas enough that I decided to do some due diligence on his company.

In fact, it was Marc Harris who brought me to Panama for the first time, as I was mainly European based back then. I remember flying into Panama City airport and being greeted by a uniformed hostess who whisked me through customs into the VIP room. I was then swiftly picked up in a Jaguar and driven to the Miramar Intercontinental Hotel where reservations had been made for me.

After spending the whole of the next day in Harris’ office, including a meeting with the guru himself, I wasn’t so impressed. Good ideas, yes, but everything was too vague. Some things rang alarm bells in my head. I remember, for example, commenting on the wide range of mutual funds the Harris Organisation apparently administered. A member of staff admitted to me that most of these so-called mutual funds with exotic names did not actually have any money in them, and had been set up simply in case some random investor decided one day to invest by ticking the box for such-and-such a fund. Apparently, the plan was that once the money was in, they would figure out what to do with it.

Somehow I just didn’t have the right feeling about investing my money, even less my clients’ money, with Marc Harris, despite the very generous commissions I was offered. But he did take me out partying. Fortunately that was the extent of my connection with Marc Harris. I still don’t believe he was so much of an intentional scammer, as just somebody who was truly completely and utterly bonkers, but had the personality to convince investors with hundreds of millions of dollars to play along with him.

Watching the CNBC documentary last night, though, brought to mind four important lessons we can learn from the Harris case and apply to our offshore businesses today:

1. It’s good to put your funds with a proper bank or fund administrator. Harris’s outfit never was a bank neither did it have any kind of financial services license.
2. Due diligence is often just a matter of asking a few probing questions and judging not the response itself, but how the other party responds. Understand exactly what you are investing in. I wrote a more in-depth article on due diligence for High Yield Investments and avoiding offshore banking scams here.
3. Offshore financial institutions should maintain a low profile. Harris was not toppled from his pedestal because he was a scammer. He was not brought down, as the CNBC program suggested, because of his involvement with a freon tax evasion scheme in Florida – that was just a convenient excuse for the prosecutors at the time. He was toppled because he became a real pain in the butt for the IRS and the US government. I remember his frequent emails promoting investments in Cuba explicitly to Americans (forbidden fruit) for example. Don’t deal with offshore banks that like poking sticks at poisonous snakes.
4. Diversification, diversification and diversification. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t have one company or bank managing your entire portfolio.

If you are interested in learning more about the right way to go about offshore banking, investing, asset protection and wealth creation, then if you haven’t already signed up for our free five part Secrets of the Super Rich course, please use the signup box to the right of this page to register for your free copy. Please remember you will need to confirm your email by receiving an automated e-mail and clicking on the link before you will be able to receive the course.

From the lobby of a private bank somewhere offshore, this is Peter Macfarlane signing off!

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Imagine going to a meeting in a 5-star hotel lobby, pretending to represent an online gambling operation, and receiving a CD containing details of 1.2 million individual bank accounts. Well that’s exactly what happened recently in Hamburg, Germany – the ‘buyers’ were really reporters for German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche, and the ’sellers’ were just offering proof that they could deliver a total of 21 million accounts.

We’re not talking about a few hacked bank accounts for sale here. We’re talking about invasion of personal financial privacy on an immense scale. According to the magazine, three out of four German households would have to be afraid that some money could be taken from their checking account without their authorisation, and perhaps even without their realising it. This kind of grand scale data theft is of the type mentioned in an article covering cybercrime, data refineries and encryption on the Q Wealth Report’s Privacy Technology page.

In another case, a former Canadian IT executive  has been accused of purloining a computer  tape containing personal information of 3.2 million customers that could net as much as $10m on the black market, according to The Register.

And in still another case recently, online payment service CheckFree apparently lost control of at least two of its domains on  in an attack that sent customers to servers run by a notorious crime gang  based in Eastern Europe. A customer, apparently concerned over invalid security certificates, called CheckFree’s support number and informed them. They had not even noticed the problem.

Occurences like these are going to become more and more common, as more and more data is linked by identifiers such as Social Security numbers. Data refineries in Eastern Europe specialize in collecting banking information stolen at different times, by differerent people in different places, and collating everything together to create a perfect profile of an individual for online banking fraud. With initiatives such as Real ID in the USA and the National ID Card Scheme in the UK, the problem is just set to become worst. More standardized and better referenced ID profiles makes things much easier for the cyber criminals.

It is quite realistic in my view to suggest that this kind of crime is capable of bringing down an entire nation’s banking system. Imagine if a crime syndicate launched attacks on 21 million accounts at once. This is quite within the realms of technical possibility. It just requires one little security flaw, somewhere, one careless move on the part of a tired bank security official to let the process begin.

Of course, you could argue, why would criminals want to bring down the banking system when instead they could just milk it – exactly as they are doing now, in fact. Hmm. Why would anyone want to destroy the twin towers?

Come to that, would you have believed a week ago that a sole Ponzi hyper could steal $50 billion from the likes of Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and HSBC?

Does banking offshore provide a solution? In part yes. For a variety of reasons I might go in to another time if people are interested, but mainly simply because of lack of volume, hacking into offshore online bank accounts is neither so easy nor such an attractive proposition. Onshore, online bank accounts are a much softer and more financially attractive target.

Of course, you shouldn’t rely on the banking system altogether. Investment 101 is diversify, diversify, diversify. What would happen if Mastercard and Visa went down for a week? Would you manage? I would suggest keeping at least a month’s worth of living money in cash in a safe place at home, and diversifying a good part of your savings into physical gold and silver bullion coins that will hold their value in the event of a financial meltdown. And if you are going to use the banking system, as you probably must, hold multiple bank accounts in multiple currencies in multiple countries!

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For about as long as I remember, I’ve been bucking trends by advising offshore clients against Swiss banks in general and UBS in particular because they are not safe from a privacy point of view.

According to the NY times:Switzerland’s tax authorities, under pressure from a growing United States investigation into the Swiss bank giant UBS, are expected to hand over confidential data on wealthy American clients of UBS to the Justice Department, two people briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

The move would represent a significant shift in Switzerland’s banking secrecy laws, whose tradition dates to the Middle Ages.

UBS began handing over data on hundreds of American clients with offshore private banking accounts to the Swiss taxing authority starting in August, these people said.

The delivery to the Justice Department, expected to take place within several months, would place American client names in the hands of federal prosecutors seeking to build criminal cases against wealthy Americans they suspect of tax evasion.

The full story is available here. Of course, nothing surprising new here as I already wrote about this here.

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In the US, Wachovia went down today. National City is headed south too. Oddly, the USD increased against the EUR.

The British Chancellor stated that the taxpayers will not have to pay the “entire” cost of the bankruptcy of Bradford and Bingley. Interesting, and perhaps reassuring, to note that their Isle of Man operations were also bailed out by the UK taxpayer.

Hypo stayed on in there to fight for another day. More details of the Fortis bailout by the governments of Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg emerged. Fortis have major operations in Luxembourg (the former Banque Generale du Luxembourg or BGL, where I used to open accounts for clients years ago…) so this may rank as the first major “offshore” bank failure. Most likely not the last.

Gold shot up again today. Again, not unexpected. I repeat my advice to buy physical gold bullion coins if possible.

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I’m losing count now, but I think these are respectively the sixth and seventh US banks to fail this year. Well, technically they didn’t fail. What happened was in one fell swoop, the FDIC lost $862 million, and First National Bank of Nevada and First Heritage Bank NA of California will reopen on Monday as branches of Mutual of Omaha Bank.

Well,I don’t want to spoil your weekend. If you want to read more about the above, here’s the link.

If you want to do something about reducing your own exposure to US banks, here’s the link. 

If you want to visit Panama City in November and discuss this in person with like-minded individuals, and work out strategies to profit from the current chaos, here’s the link. 

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Quite a number of our readers (about 30% I believe) are UK residents. Those who travel outside the UK will be interested to read this case, which  makes it much easier to sue your UK credit card company in the case of any problems overseas…

Specialist travel and tourism solicitor Andrew Morton at Manchester law firm Pannone LLP says a landmark decision from the House of Lords (Office of Fair Trading – v – Lloyds TSB Bank) means that tourists and other travellers abroad have had rights against their credit card companies confirmed, under Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974.

“The decision”, says Andrew Morton, “means that a traveller who pays for goods and services abroad by credit card has a direct route to compensation for injuries and other losses against his credit card company. This avoids the need for the traveller to pursue his/her claim against a foreign entity, for example a hotel, theme park or excursion provider, through the Court of that country. The right against the credit card company can be enforced here in the UK with the bank, in effect, stepping into the shoes of the supplier of the services.

New route to a remedy
“The growth in D.I.Y and bespoke packages means more holidays and trips abroad may not now be covered by the Package Travel Regulations 1992. Left to take action against a foreign company, the traveller often finds that this is not viable. This new route to a remedy takes away many of the difficulties that could see travellers being advised to leave action against the travel company aside in favour of a simpler remedy against their bank.

“For example, a traveller booking a hotel in Majorca by credit card who is injured by the negligence of the hotel or its staff can now sue his bank in England with no direct reference to the hotel itself”.

It should though be noted that this only applies to regulated credit card transactions where the value of the transaction falls between £100.00 and £30,000.00.

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