Harneys' Ideas, Innovations, and Investments conference series: The BVI – adding the G to ESG

The market is flooded with news and events surrounding the topic of Environmental, Social and Governance and its importance to what we do, how we do it, and who we do it with. For many years, Partner Greg Boyd has advocated the BVI Corporate Advantage.

The BVI Corporate Advantage is a corporate structural solution that uses strong corporate governance tools to mitigate corporate risk, attract and protect investment, and promote project viability and success. A successful project improves the lives of the people on the ground, and the BVI Corporate Advantage contributes to that socio-economic achievement, especially in frontier and emerging markets that may lack modern and flexible corporate legislation, or a stable common law-based court system and case law.

In this third video of the series, Greg is joined by Jose Ordoñez, CEO of Kingo Energy.

Ranked as the second-best start-up in Latin America by the World Economic Forum, Kingo provides off-grid communities with a scalable, world-class, solar energy service that improves lives, facilitates earnings, and builds careers along the way. Greg has acted as BVI legal advisor to Kingo, in relation to several rounds of equity financing.

Greg and Jose discuss how the BVI Corporate Advantage has assisted Kingo with the corporate governance of their equity financing rounds. In particular, they explore why that is important where funding is provided by DFIs and Development Banks, who adhere to the G20/OECD1 (2015) Principles of Corporate Governance that provide the framework of international best practices for corporate governance systems. They address:

• What is corporate governance?
• Why is corporate governance important?
• How has structuring the equity financing rounds through a BVI company added to Kingo’s corporate governance?
• How has that assisted Kingo in being able to measure, report on, and demonstrate its corporate governance standards?

This discussion formed part of our inaugural Ideas, Innovations, and Investments virtual conference.