Institutional Instability, Regulatory Fragmentation, and the Status of Contested Comorian Offshore Financial Licenses

Abstract

The Banque Centrale des Comores (BCC) does not recognize banking and financial licenses attributed to the Anjouan Offshore Finance Authority (AOFA) or the Mwali International Services Authority (MISA), and under current compliance practice the question of present operating authority is answered by reference to the BCC alone. This article separates that question from a narrower doctrinal one: whether every island-attributed instrument must be characterized as fraudulent at inception. Working through doctrinal legal analysis under an explicit hierarchy of sources, it distinguishes the current validity of a regulatory instrument from its original legal status. The 2001 constitutional settlement conferred substantial island autonomy, yet the boundary between Union monetary competence and island-administered economic powers remains open to competing and unresolved interpretations. Because subsequent centralization produced neither a published adjudication of that boundary nor an integrated transitional regime, the constitutional question still governs how island-attributed instruments should be classified retrospectively, at least as of the July 2026 source cutoff. On the present record, neither AOFA nor MISA falls into the purely fraudulent category at the institutional level, since each invokes an island-level claim to public authority within an unresolved competence dispute. The taxonomy developed here separates fraudulent instruments, instruments subsequently invalidated or superseded, and instruments whose original legality remains contested. Neither body holds operating authority at present. Two practical implications follow: prudential authority is allocated to the BCC, and any inquiry into the legal status of island-attributed instruments must be document-specific and fact-intensive rather than presumptive. An unresolved allocation of sovereign power also leaves room for sovereign liability where foreign parties act in reliance on apparent state authority.