Sarnia Yachts

We are not sure that too many people are able to definitively answer this question. It is an untested area to date, so any advice taken must rely solely on opinions rather than any precedents.

There has been quite a rush in the last few years amongst EU service providers and yacht managers to develop their own crew employment companies located outside of the EU in places like Guernsey, Jersey, the BVI or the Cayman Islands.

Sarnia Yachts is no different as a number of years ago we formed a dedicated Guernsey Protected Cell Company (“PCC”) under the brand name “Sarnia Crew”. This is so that the crew for each yacht can be employed by a separate protected cell of the PCC which aims to ring fence the assets and liabilities associated with each yacht’s crew employment activites.

We would like to think however that Sarnia Yachts’ crew employment service is about as genuinely non- EU as conceivably or practically possible for the following reasons: 

1. Sarnia Yachts has, like many other groups, recently established a specific employment vehicle in the form of a Guernsey PCC, but we have in fact been undertaking crew employment for nearly 40 years from our base in Guernsey. So while our employment vehicle itself may be relatively new, providing non EU crew employment services is something we are very familiar with;
2. Our PCC used for crew employment services is 100% owned by us and ultimately by Guernsey resident individual shareholders. It is not a company managed on behalf of and therefore potentially a subsidiary of a business operating within the EU;
3. All the decision making in respect of the management of our crew employment company is undertaken by us as directors in Guernsey so we are comfortable that the real mind & management of our crew employment business takes place outside of the EU;
4. All of our payroll transactions are authorised and released by us in Guernsey from our Guernsey based bank accounts. They are not controlled by a party located in the EU who logs onto a Non EU on-line banking system.

Going back to the original question, we are not saying that the above criteria are absolutely essential in establishing an effective non EU employment arrangement. However the changes that have driven the rapid increase in the number of non-EU employment companies are quite recent and as yet they have not appeared on too many radar screens. If or when they do, we are comfortable that our service offering is as genuinely non EU as possible, as a result of all of our operations being undertaken from outside of the EU at our Guernsey offices.

For the basis of this text, the term EU also includes the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland