At its Annual General Meeting the Association of Corporate Service Providers appointed three new board members, Neal Aitken, Simon Harding and Philip Knop.
Mr Aitken is head of compliance for the international law and professional services group Cains and serves as its compliance officer and deputy MLRO, including the group’s fiduciary arm, Cains Fiduciaries Limited, of which he was formerly a director.
He has more than 25 years’ financial services, company secretarial and fiduciary experience, having previously worked in stockbroking operations and in the company secretariat of a FTSE 250 newspaper and publishing business in the UK. He has spent the last 18 years in the offshore fiduciary sector in both client services and regulatory compliance.
He is a Fellow of both the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators (ICSA) and the International Compliance Association, a specialist member of the Institute of Risk Management – (Corporate Governance), and holds the ICSA post-qualifying diploma in Company and Trust Offshore Planning.
Mr Harding is an Isle of Man advocate with extensive corporate law experience in private practice, both in the Isle of Man and the UK. A partner in the Isle of Man office of Appleby, a leading provider of offshore legal and fiduciary services, he divides his time between legal practice within the corporate and commercial practice group, where he handles a wide range of transactional and advisory corporate and financial services work with a focus on regulatory advice, funds and public companies, and his responsibilities as a director of Appleby Trust (Isle of Man) Limited, a trust and corporate service provider licensed by the Isle of Man Financial Supervision Commission.
Mr Knop is a qualified accountant and chartered tax adviser and a director of the Boston Group, an international multi-family office with headquarters in the Isle of Man. He is head of the group’s tax, risk and compliance team and chairman of the company’s risk management committee.
He has more than 25 years’ experience in the finance sector, starting with a career in the UK before relocating to the Isle of Man and into public practice with Grant Thornton in 2000 where he established the firm’s tax practice before moving into the fiduciary sector in 2007 as senior tax manager for an Island-based trust and corporate service provider.
In 2011 he joined Boston as a director of the licensed entity and has recently attained a board position at group level. He is also a member of the Institute of Directors and was recently successful in the Institute’s certificate and diploma examinations.
ACSP chairman Mark Denton said: ‘It is with great pleasure that I welcome Neal, Philip and Simon to the board. They bring with them a breadth and depth of experience which, together with that of their fellow board members, will serve the association and, importantly, the CSP industry well at a time of sweeping changes to the regulatory landscape at home and internationally. I am confident these appointments will serve to strengthen the ACSP’s position as a trade body noted for its challenging voice and providing robust representation in consultation forums.’
Photo - Philip Knop.
