Sean Inggs

  The offshore investment fund industry has spent decades building a governance infrastructure that works. Institutional investors expect it. Regulators require it. And when it breaks down, the consequences are rarely quiet. The collapses that defined the last two decades of fund management, from the frauds of the early 2000s to the post-2008 wave of enforcement action, largely came back to the same structural failure: insufficient independent oversight at the board level. Now, that same failure is playing out in real time across the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. And the stakes are significant. What Independent Directors Actually Do There is a persistent misconception that an independent director is a formality, a name on a document that satisfies a regulatory checkbox. In practice, an effective independent director is the person in the room who asks the question nobody else will. They are not employed by the fund manager, they do not share in the upside of the fund’s perfor...