PwC Luxembourg is the leading professional services firm in the country with around 2,400 people. Similarly, its Real Estate and Infrastructure team is the largest multidisciplinary team of specialists in the Grand Duchy with more than 250 experts supporting global real estate managers; these range from tax advisers and engineers to auditors and fund accountants. “We service a large segment of the Luxembourg and international real estate market and this allows our team to deliver tailor-made specialised services to our clients,” explains Amaury Evrard, Partner and Real Estate Leader at PwC Luxembourg. “We can make the most of our global

By Kavitha Ramachandran, Maitland – As the alternative investment market matures, investors are increasingly demanding far more information and transparency from fund managers in return for their capital. Transparency is the new name of the game. In this regard, the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) may be viewed as a single piece of regulation, but its ultimate aims are more or less in line with other regulatory changes such as MiFID II/MiFIR and PRIPS. There will come a point where the reporting and transparency requirements demanded under the AIFMD will become the minimum accepted standard needed to attract investors. It

A true sign of how well a fund jurisdiction is doing is the level of growth, not just in new fund formations, but asset growth within administration firms. The onset of the AIFMD has opened up a new range of services for administrators, in particular by providing a Depo Lite solution to managers running non-EU funds. Ipes is one of the world’s leading private equity fund administrators. According to Justin Partington (pictured), Commercial Director at Ipes, “clients are continually asking us about Management Company solutions and providing substance in Luxembourg. There are significant hurdles to set up a ManCo because we

There is no experience as the one gained in the front lines. The fund industry struggles with changing regulation, and those companies whose business model is based on providing reporting services know best that the devil lies in the detail. The following are a number of observations after 12 months of report production and filing of the Annex IV Transparency Reports of AIFMD. During the preparation phase, KNEIP, one of the industry’s long-standing legal and regulatory report providers, has learned a number of lessons that it is applying to ensure that the filing process becomes as hassle-free for managers as

It is fair to say that alternative fund managers are feeling a degree of regulatory fatigue. Every month, it seems, there are updates, developments and areas of additional compliance. But whilst on the surface this can appear overwhelming, digging a little deeper reveals that service providers are positioning themselves to offer a more complete set of value-added solutions. As a leading European domicile, Luxembourg is seeing this develop first hand. One firm, Credit Suisse Fund Services, has moved quickly to bring a menu of options to help managers address today’s fund management issues.   “Focusing purely on security services, asset

“There has been a lot of fund activity in Luxembourg this year focused on private equity and real estate. It’s an area of growing investor demand. They are looking for different options now and ways for investing that go beyond hedge funds,” observes Jesper Steiness, director of business development EMEA at Advent (Luxembourg). This is encouraging news for the jurisdiction and suggests the early signs of greater private equity fund formation are favourable. But as Steiness’s colleague Roger Woolman, senior solutions consultant at Advent notes, the firm is also working more with hybrid fund structures on a global basis.   “What

“The Special Limited Partnership (SCSp) has been successfully introduced into Luxembourg law. It is set to benefit from onshore fund activity following the AIFMD and is of particular interest to Anglo-Saxon managers and investors given their familiarity with limited partnership structures,” explains Paul Van den Abeele (pictured), Partner at Clifford Chance (Luxembourg). In essence, what Luxembourg’s lawmakers have done is modernise what was quite an antiquated limited partnership regime in the SCS (société en commandite simple) based on the 1915 company law.   Alternative fund managers – in particular private equity and real estate managers – can now choose to either

“The Special Limited Partnership (SCSp) has been successfully introduced into Luxembourg law. It is set to benefit from onshore fund activity following the AIFMD and is of particular interest to Anglo-Saxon managers and investors given their familiarity with limited partnership structures,” explains Paul Van den Abeele (pictured), Partner at Clifford Chance (Luxembourg). In essence, what Luxembourg’s lawmakers have done is modernise what was quite an antiquated limited partnership regime in the SCS (société en commandite simple) based on the 1915 company law.   Alternative fund managers – in particular private equity and real estate managers – can now choose to either