Three choices stack on top of the domicile: the legal vehicle, the product class (UCITS or AIF), and the structure (stand-alone or umbrella). Get any one of them wrong and the target investor cannot, or will not, subscribe.
A useful way to remember the stack is: where it lives, what legal shape it has, who may buy it, and whether it shares a platform with other funds. Those choices sound technical, but they decide whether a pension scheme, bank platform, financial adviser, or ordinary saver can use the product.
Ireland provides four vehicles: an investment company, a unit trust, a common contractual fund (CCF), and a limited partnership. The investment company, authorised as a UCITS and built as an umbrella, is the default cross-border retail product. The others exist for narrower jobs.
Atlantic Horizon made that default combination on purpose. Atlantic Horizon UCITS ICAV is an Irish investment company, authorised as a UCITS, structured as an umbrella, with Equity Income as a sub-fund. Atlantic Horizon Cayman Fund is the same house’s Cayman sleeve — not one of the four Irish vehicles — for buyers who will not, or cannot, hold a UCITS. State Street is the depositary chain on the Irish book. The Dublin administrator runs NAV and the register for both, because an Irish UCITS cannot outsource those two jobs.
- A CCF is not open to individuals, so it could not have been the Equity Income wrapper.
- A limited partnership is rarely used for regulated Irish funds, and it cannot be a UCITS.
- A unit trust is awkward to distribute into civil-law EU markets that expect a company.
Whatever the wrapper, an Irish fund needs an Irish depositary, an Irish administrator, an investment manager, a distributor, an auditor, and a company secretary — and two Irish-resident directors on the board. Those names are the Central Bank file, not a brochure footnote. Atlantic Horizon’s file names State Street, the Dublin administrator, and the two resident directors before it names the portfolio.