The new range of services will cater for the company’s existing client base in the region, as well as reach out to a new audience, according to the company’s group chief executive, Greg Ellison.
He and company director Katherine Ellis will head up the company's Gulf region business development initiative, and with this in mind "are due to travel to Dubai on a regular basis to develop contacts there", a company spokesperson said.
The office is the latest overseas venture on the part of the Boston Group. As reported here in November, after opening an office in Malta last year it was subseqeuntly granted a full trust licence by the Malta Financial Services Authority, enabling it to offer its Maltese clients what the company said at the time would be a “full spectrum” of Maltese trust and foundation structures, on top of its existing corporate services range there.
In a story on the Isle of Man Today news website in May 2011, Ellison – who at that point had just left his job as managing director of the Isle of Man’s largest private employer at that time, Barclays Wealth, to take the top job at Boston Group – was photographed holding a globe, and quoted as saying international expansion was high on his agenda for the company.
Launch party
Boston Group officials formally launched their new Gulf business at a soiree last month, which was held at the Dubai International Finance Centre’s Capital Club.
Here, Ellison detailed the Boston Group’s range of services for his guests, accompanied by former British & Irish Lions rugby player Scott Gibbs, whom the company refers to as its “global brand ambassador”.
Gibbs, whose current roles in addition to promoting Boston Group is being a broadcaster for the Gulf’s OSN pay television network, is said to spend several months a year in the region. Ellison is himself a former rugby player, who met Gibbs when they were both at Swansea Rugby Club years ago, after Ellison won a rugby scholarship to Swansea University.
Ellis was also on hand for the launch event, as was fellow Boston Group director Phil Knop, with whom she had, at that point, been returning to the Isle of Man from a week-long tour of the Middle East and Asia.
Boston Group was founded in 2002 as a family office, and subsequently expanded to look after the assets of other individuals.
In April, the company revealed its Boston Trust Co arm had acquired IOMA Fiduciary, also based in the IoM. IOMA Fiduciary had been a part of the IOMA Group, which is more than 30 years old, and which is said to have been one the first composite insurance companies on the Isle of Man. The purchase price was not disclosed.
