Dr Robert Mathavious, the British Virgin Islands Financial Services Commission’s managing director and chief executive officer, has informed the board that he will retire from the regulatory body on 31 December.

Mathavious has played a pivotal part in charting the course of the BVI financial services industry for more than 35 years. He has had an illustrious 25-year career as a civil servant, during which he served as Deputy Financial Secretary (1980-1985), Financial Secretary (1985-1991) and Director of Financial Services (1993-2001). In January 2002, he assumed his present post of Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of the FSC.

Mathavious, who holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Economics from the University of the West Indies and a Masters of Business Administration from Georgetown University in the United States, is the FSC’s first and only MD/CEO since it was created in 2001 by the Financial Services Commission Act.

Like most chief regulators, he is responsible for establishing and maintaining a regulatory regime that obeys the pronouncements of global organisations such as the Organisation for International Co-operation and Development, the Financial Action Task Force, the International Organisation of Securities Commissions and the International Association of Insurance Supervisors. He is also responsible for the administration and operation of the FSC, the regulation of the BVI’s financial services industry, dealing with international regulatory initiatives and liaison between the FSC and the Government. Single regulators became popular at the end of the 1990s because cabinet ministers in various countries liked the idea of having only one man to ring up when things went wrong; Mathavious set up one of the first of these in the Anglosphere.

Mathavious has provided advice to regional and other IFCs about strategies to keep them off blacklists. He was instrumental in the formation of the International Trade Investment Organisation (ITIO), a grouping of small of offshore jurisdictions which united to counteract the OECD’s discredited Harmful Tax Competition Initiative (which collapsed in the 'noughties only to be resurrected in another form) and in the commissioning of the hallmark “Towards a Level Playing Field”, a report jointly issued by the ITIO and STEP (the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners) as a critique and response to the OECD report.

Mathavious sits on several professional boards, including the Financial Investigation Agency Board and a FATCA Negotiating Team for the BVI. He is a fellow of the Offshore Institute. In 2013, the University of the West Indies made him a Doctor of Law, Honoris Causa and he acted as Governor of the Virgin Islands on several occasions in the absence of the actual Governor from the territory.