Bermuda has an ace up its sleeve when it fights with other jurisdictions for Latin American business. That ace is Appleby's Eduardo Fox, second cousin of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, who has spent the best part of two decades promoting the Island overseas. Mr. Fox spoke with Alex Wright about his life and career.

Putting Bermuda on the map through global business diversification has been top of Eduardo Fox's agenda since he joined Appleby 18 years ago.

For the international law firm's manager of corporate and Latin American affairs and his team of legal, financial and marketing experts has expanded from its original operation on the Island and in Hong Kong to doing business as far afield as Spain, Portugal and Latin America.

He even plans to move into the emerging markets such as India, China and Russia in the future.

Mr. Fox started his career working for Banco Minero Y Mercantil in his homeland of Mexico while studying finance and graduating as an accountant at the University of Mexico, the largest university in the world.

He then joined a distributor of agricultural equipment John Deere, before going to work as a distributing manager for H Khonestamm & Co., an international chemical product company, where he learnt English dealing with international clients based in Mexico.

A chance visit to Bermuda en route to London in 1976 led to him taking up a job working with mutual fund valuation in corporate trusts at the Bank of Bermuda and he is still here 33 years later, being recruited by Bacardi International as budget manager and followed by a brief stint managing a local group of companies which ran a service station and photography business, and subsequently linking up with Appleby, never looking back since.

"I am a (Certified) accountant by profession and marketer by trade," he said. "I was basically passing through and it was just a good coincidence that Bermuda was on the way to London.

"My original thought prior to leaving Mexico was to go to Europe and give it a try, but Bermuda has been very good to me and I try to be good to Bermuda in return."

Mr. Fox was taken on by Peter Bubenzer, global managing partner at Appleby at the time, who was looking for a financial expert to manage and administer the corporate and commercial sides of the firm, starting with the trusts department, but he soon found that his own ambitions fitted perfectly with the international vision of Mr. Bubenzer, which drove the business, and went about promoting Appleby on the world stage.

"In a 'perfect storm' sort of way, Peter Bubenzer's global diversification vision met with my own, in terms of further utilisation of my marketing experience and Latin languages and business culture knowledge, which was further reinforced by our current Bermuda office managing partner, Shaun Morris, and global heads of corporate commercial and trusts practices, Judy Collis and Tim Faries, respectively," he said.

"We found ourselves no longer being just a Bermuda and Hong Kong outfit, but rather an international firm and one of the largest offshore firms in the world.

"We started by looking at Latin America and our form was one of the pioneers of diversifying in that area and, of course, I know the language and culture, which is especially useful when dealing with the new generation of executives in Latin America who speak English, so it is more important now to know their business culture above all."

Mr. Fox, who set up a Latin America team and marketing strategy aimed at some of the biggest economies in the world, including Spain (eighth largest economy), Brazil (10th) and Mexico (14th), said his best part of the job is bringing new business and clients to Bermuda. Mr. Fox also spearheaded, in partnership with Government, the successful effort to bring the Latin American Risk & Insurance Managers Association Conference on the Island for the first time ever in 2004, which is one of his proudest achievements to date. Twenty-five countries were represented, from Latin America, the US, Canada and South Africa to Spain, Portugal and even Russia, and the event is set to return to Bermuda later this year, as announced by Premier Ewart Brown in Argentina last year.

"A large part of my job is basically to help develop that market from here as well as on the road," he said. "But really the part that I like most about my job is to be able to bring new clients to Bermuda.

"It is good to deal with my fellow Latinos, but it is mainly the thrill of knowing that any new client brought to Bermuda will bring work to dozens of people here in all industries, including helping with the Island's tourism industry."

Mr. Fox, who is the second cousin of former Mexican President Vicente Fox and whose grandparents hail from Spain and Germany, said one of the biggest changes he has seen since arriving on Bermuda's shores all those years ago was the transition from tourism (which made up 75 percent of Bermuda's economy at the time) to international business, helped by Appleby's decision to move into the Latin American market in the late 1990s.

"Definitely the support by the firm has been tremendous form this aspect," he said. "The Bermuda reinsurance market and the international business sector in general has been very responsive these days and they have seen the success as well and now many Bermuda-based companies have offices in Latin America, particularly in Sao Paulo in Brazil," he said.

"We consider Brazil to be the main economy that we want to access as it probably has the biggest potential for new business in Latin America. Vice-versa, the biggest companies in Latin America are all represented in Bermuda."

He said one of the biggest adjustments he had to make was moving from a financial background into a legal environment, when he first joined Appleby, but he has taken to it like a duck to water, assisted by his knowledge of business law.

"Appleby is essentially a financial institution in many ways and at the end of the day this is a business," he said. "It was just an adaptation of them to me and me to them and hopefully we have adapted to each other now.

"I am growing with the firm — we have now fully established this Latin America team, but I want to expand into all the merging markets, such as India, China and Russia, because that is where we have to look to in the future.

"We have to diversify in Bermuda and we cannot depend only on our traditional markets for the years to come."

Mr. Fox lives in Hamilton Parish, near Shelly Bay, with his wife Erica and two corgi dogs, where he enjoys uninterrupted views of Somerset and Harrington Sound. He used to keep goal for Coopers & Lybrand (before it merged with Price Waterhouse to form PricewaterhouseCoopers) and still enjoys playing doubles tennis matches when he finds some spare time. He's also a big fan of all Latin music and dances like salsa and tango.

And Mr. Fox, who has travelled extensively across Latin America, from Argentina and Brazil to Venezuela and Peru, reckons Latin America has enormous potential to tap into, with its major economies not suffering from exposure to the sub-prime crisis and subsequent fallout, and big players including Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Chile all growing well, as well as having established travel routes with Bermuda via Miami in the US since 2005.

He also admires new US President Barack Obama and believes he does not have any plans to shut down Bermuda as a tax haven.

"With this thing of dumping Bermuda in the same bag as tax havens, we are not a tax haven, but I do not think Obama knows that," he said. "All the words that Obama said were given to him by his advisers, so we have to go and speak to them and remind them that we have a Tax Information Exchange Agreement. "Let us take advantage of that and utilise it to remind him that we are not a tax haven — we just have to get the view across quite clearly for as long as it takes to realise it."