The Jersey Financial Services Commission has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Liechtenstein Financial Market Authority, setting up a formal but not legally binding mechanism for co-operation on supervisory matters and the exchange of information.

John Harris, the director-general of the JFSC, and Dr Urs Phillipp Roth-Cuony and Mario Gassner, respectively the chairman and CEO of the FMA, signed the document in a ceremony at the FMA’s offices in Liechtenstein.

The regulators believe that the problems of both jurisdictions are going to resemble each other more and more as time goes on. Close co-operation is their rememdy. The regulators used the phrase 'mutual assistance,' which is a vague echo of the stronger 'mutual legal assistance' on which co-operating police forces rely when tracing dirty money in each other's jurisdictions. MoUs fall short of this but are useful sources of non-binding procedure.

The JFSC has MoUs (both one-to-one and multilateral) with regulators in more than 90 countries. Last year a senior manager from the FMA completed a successful two-month secondment at the JFSC, focusing on money laundering and terrorist finance.