Of Japanese securities investment abroad in January-November last year, about 5.84 trillion yen (56.7 billion dollars) flowed into hedge funds set up in the Cayman Islands, Bahamas and elsewhere in the Caribbean, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said.

It was the largest amount of Caribbean-bound capital flow on record and represented a 150-percent increase from a year earlier, the leading business daily said.

It eclipsed the amount that found its way to Europe in the same period and started to approach the level sent to the United States, the report said.

The amount accounted for 31.7 percent of all Japanese securities investment in the 11 months. It was the first time that the share of Caribbean-bound capital topped 30 percent, it said.

Japanese investment capital going to the Caribbean is believed to be redirected into the US and European investment markets, Nihon Keizai said.

Thanks partly to the increased inflow from Japan, capital going to the United States from the Caribbean has been expanding at an annual rate of about 50 percent, the daily reported, quoting the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute.

The employee pension fund at electronics giant Toshiba Corp., which manages more than 300 billion yen in assets, started funneling 25 percent of its holdings into alternative investments in the year to March 2006, the report said.

By: Caribbean news