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Profile
Gearing up for financial services sanctions
responsibilities generally of non-executive directors (NEDs). This outwardly easy-going lawyer, reflects: “Anecdotally, things have now changed; previously there had been a view that executive and non-executive director responsibilities are different, even though legally they are exactly the same.”
As a NZ regulator, he was not unused to controversy. When General Counsel for the New Zealand Commerce Commission, the competition, trade and major infrastructure regulator - a combination of Ofcom, tele- communications, electricity, airports and, unusually, aspects of the dairy industry – he was involved in high profile cases concerning leading companies. These included “Telecom New Zealand acting anti-competitively, with which we did not succeed, but ultimately in a subsequent action they did pay a $NZ 12m fine”, he recalls.
Over a decade from 2000, Taylor grew the Commerce Commission team of four lawyers to reach 30 as the role of regulator increased and he had to balance provision of legal services and manage conflicts. “It was an executive role, as well as supervising major legal cases with telecommunications and airline companies”, he explains.
Disappearing work
Keen to be his own boss, he took “a leap in the dark” briefly to become an independent barrister, made possible because of NZ’s fused legal profession [as is the case in Gibraltar] drawing on his experience in competition, economic regulation and fair-trading. The move came as financial markets crashed, his expected work in mergers and acquisitions disappeared and major importuning work collapsed too.
He was approached to become Director of Legal Services for the NZ Customs Service. “They had been searching for some time and not found the right person to take on the role - similar to here in a way - [the GFSC took over a year to fill his position].
“It wasn’t on my career list as something I wanted to do, but it turned out to be a fascinating role from a legal and executive management perspective, getting me involved in a whole range of customs activity in terms of excise duty and criminal prosecutions”, Taylor discloses
Having gained his law degree at Christchurch University, Taylor spent 3 years working for a local legal firm and did some minor defence work, but Customs “was the first time of doing the serious prosecution.
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Thirty-two years after working in Europe on his first Overseas Experience (OE) from New Zealand (NZ), Peter Taylor’s “later years OE” ended up with him becoming Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC) director of legal, policy and enforcement – and almost immediately he became embroiled in controversy
Returning from a three week Spanish holiday in autumn 2015, Taylor and NZ-born wife, Debbie, began
“toying with the idea of doing what in NZ is an increasingly popular ‘later years’ overseas experience” after looking back nostalgically at the couple’s first trip to Europe and his ten years working in London as a solicitor.
“It’s a bit like pretending you are 18 again, but in later years, you can get a well- paid job and have decent accommodation to live much more comfortably; it’s a more enjoyable way of doing it”, Taylor quips.
Co-incidentally, immediately after returning ‘Down Under’ in late 2015, a recruitment agency suggested talking about a position in Gibraltar. “It piqued my interest and was timely,” he said. “I was also fascinated by the size of Gibraltar having a financial services industry that warranted its own regulator and I was intrigued as to how that worked.”
He had not worked in financial services before – apart from three years in Wellington two decades earlier, doing commercial litigation for banking and other clients at local law firm, Simpson Grierson – although Taylor had done a lot of regulatory enforcement work.
With the aim of broadening further his experience, he arrived at the GFSC in May 2016 and within a month Enterprise Insurance Company collapsed. “The interesting thing to me was the actions of the directors, who walked in and told us the company was insolvent, which was surprising given the highly regulated nature of the sector in Gibraltar,” he recalls.
The controversial bit came when 59 years old Taylor said publicly that the GFSC needed to investigate what had happened and whether the directors were responsible!
“There was a significant risk of reputational damage to the insurance industry here, so we wanted to make sure we took a very appropriate, measured step”, he tells.
It’s an on-going investigation into Enterprise’s £96m debt - the jurisdiction’s largest insolvency case - so he’s restricted as to what can be said: external investigators have been appointed and witnesses are being interviewed.
The collapse of an insurance company on this scale obviously raises very serious concerns for the company’s policyholders and for the Gibraltar insurance industry. “We wanted to send a signal to the markets, that as the regulator we take our responsibility very seriously and a company such as Enterprise could not have ended up with such a large deficit overnight; something has gone very wrong and we need to find out what and why”, he reasons.
Facing criticism
Criticism came when an article by the former chairman of Enterprise “misinterpreted” [Taylor’s] statements and accused the GFSC of predetermination. “That was not the case as we said we would need to conduct an investigation to see what we found,” Taylor insists. “If wrong-doing is found, there is a range of things that can be done”, he notes. “We want to do this as quickly as we can, but I don’t know when it will be concluded as it depends on what the investigators find”.
An early positive result of the situation has been to raise awareness of the role and
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