Spain’s financial regulator National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) has issued a warning regarding two .cat websites, forex.cat and forextrading.cat.
We would note that forextrading.cat leads to the Spanish language website of offshore FX broker LiteForex, based in the Marshall Islands, liteforex.es.
Interestingly, the .cat Internet domain is one of the issues of dispute between the Spanish government and the Catalonia region of the country. On the same day in September that Spanish authorities stormed the offices of the Catalan regional government detaining more than a dozen people, another raid occurred at the puntCat foundation, which oversees the registry of websites with the .cat domain, with one of puntCat’s senior executives arrested.
The puntCat foundation’s approval in 2005 to manage the .cat domain registry by the global Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) made it one of the first domains to explicitly refer to a unique language and culture.
But back to the current CNMV warning, the Spanish regulator warns that these companies and associated sites are not licensed in the country to take on retail clients.
The full CNMV warning can be seen here.