Johannesburg, 14 Jan 2004
Escrow Europe Holding, headquartered in Amsterdam, has opened an office in Cape Town, South Africa, to expand its network for Active escrow Services. It will trade in South Africa as Escrow Europe (Pty) Ltd and consists of a group of industry specialists targeting the southern Africa corporate market.
Andrew Stekhoven, managing director of the new entity, explained the decision to open an office on the continent saying: `Operational risk in the South African corporate world mirrors that of the global environment, where it has taken on a much higher profile since Enron and other scandals.
`Locally, as abroad, company secretaries and compliance officers worry as to how to deal with the risks across the spectrum of intellectual property related issues. They all need to be able to `tick off` good governance, as well as contain basic risk exposure such as reliance on the use of intellectual property that they do not own.
`South Africa - with its international business community, familiarity with US, UK and European business practices, and its national software industry - is starting to demand the kind of custodianship Escrow Europe has to offer.
`It can no longer rely on the traditional or passive approach to intellectual property custodianship that passive custodians, such as banks, notaries, legal firms etc offer.
`As opposed to these passive custodians, Escrow Europe executes technical verification for each and every deposit and keeps the material up-to-date by regular requests for new releases or updates from the Suppliers concerned.`
Escrow Europe`s active escrow services already extend to a number of major South African clients and good growth in business is expected for 2004.
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