The RAIF as a way to set up an investment fund vehicle in Luxembourg (5/5) - The service providers

Who are the required service providers of a RAIF?
Even though a RAIF is not directly supervised by the CSSF, as it was already mentioned, nevertheless, as regulated and lightly supervised vehicle, a RAIF is required to be indirectly supervised by 3 different types of service providers.

Thus, a RAIF is supervised in the first place by an authorized AIFM, in the second place by a depositary which is supposed to control if the decisions made by the AIFM are in line with the law and with the RAIF’s constitutive documents, and last but not least a RAIF is supposed to be supervised by a statutory auditor. The auditor here, as service provider is appointed not only to act as an extra layer of protection for the investors, but also in order to verify that the specificities of a SIF-like or a SICAR-like RAIF are respected, and for doing so, the auditor has to send an annual report to the Luxembourg tax authorities every financial year in order to make sure that the RAIF benefits from its beneficial tax regime, as it is supposed to.

Therefore, the RAIF vehicle according to its legal regime must appoint the above-mentioned three service providers and bear the costs of their fees which appear in the RAIF’s balance sheet.

In the beginning these costs have to be advanced by the initiators but after the launching of the RAIF, these costs burden the RAIF itself and thus they are spread among its investors.