Doing business in the Cayman Islands

Those are broad questions, Julien, to which I can only give general answers, but here goes...

Foreign investors are not particularly welcome. The law requires that Caymanian citizens must own 60% of all locally trading companies. Of course management-contracts can divert more than 40% of the profits to an overseas investor, but the latter can never build up more than 40% of the equity. Who would want to do that?!

It's very easy to register a company. We must have 60,000 companies registered - maybe many more; I lose track. Most of them are "offshore" tax-haven companies set up to own assets secretly held.

There is no corporate tax, and no Income Tax. Govt gets its revenue from import- and other stamp- duties and fees for those tax-haven companies, hedge funds etc.

Wages are high, for professionals employed in the tax-haven sector but other sectors not so high. Cost of living is high by US standards.  We have more foreign employees than local, and the ethnic Caymanians emphatically do NOT welcome even more foreigners. Wages in unskilled jobs are low. That would suit some drifter-expats, but not others. Back in the '90s my son went to Mexico and worked for a dollar an hour cleaning car engines in the City, to begin with; so I am not going to discourage anybody from doing anything similar. But, you know, it's not for everybody!

Anybody seriously interested in working in any foreign place should find out as much as he or she can about the place before going there. My blogsite ("Barlow's Cayman") will give readers a feel for this place. My wife and I have lived here for 34 years (and counting), and are very comfortable here. She works in a law firm, and earns enough to keep me in modest retirement.
25 years ago I established the first full-time office of the local Chamber of Commerce; now, I am a full-time gadfly and critic of government - as evidenced by my blog-postings.

Ask me specific questions and I will answer them as best I can.

thanks for your post Gordon !

I should have mentioned here - as I have done in my "Employment in Cayman" piece above this one - that we have an indentured-labour system. Work Permits are issued to employERS, not employees, and usually only for 12 months at a time, renewable. That's important to take into account.