UK territories fail to open up about secretive companies
By Lisa Barrington
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's overseas territories failed to meet demands to make secretive company ownership information public on Thursday, pledging only to share it with law agencies trying to tackle corruption.
Overseas territories and crown dependencies have come under increasing pressure to reveal who is behind anonymously owned companies, with campaign groups saying such secrecy aides money laundering, tax evasion and corrupt diversion of public funds from developing economies.
Many of these territories, such as the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, have large financial services sectors because they levy low taxes and ownership of businesses lacks transparency.
An agreement by all territories' leaders to keep central registers of company ownership comes more than a year after Prime Minister David Cameron encouraged them to create public registries.
In a joint statement at an annual meeting in London, British and overseas territories leaders "agreed to hold beneficial ownership information in our respective jurisdictions via central registers or similarly effective systems".
But the statement only mentions law enforcement authorities using the registers and not the general public or private companies conducting due diligence and anti-money laundering work.
"If these professionals -- who are the first line of defence against dirty money -- do not have access to the information about the true owners of companies, then it will prevent adequate money laundering checks being carried out and stop effective reporting of suspicious transactions to police in the first place," said Rachel Davies, acting Head of Advocacy and Research at Transparency International UK.
The group welcomed Thursday's statement but said it was only a "very small step" towards tackling money laundering.
Defending the government from accusations that the agreement had not gone far enough, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs James Duddridge said in parliament on Thursday, that "an enormous amount of progress" has been made over the past few years on financial services transparency.
However, he said that the technical side of implementing such information sharing was "tricky" and that there was no timetable yet for implementing any registers.
The EU's fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive was passed in May 2015 requiring central registers of beneficial ownership information accessible by authorities, concerned entities and members of the public who can demonstrate a legitimate interest in the information.
Britain has been making efforts to improve transparency to help clamp down on tax evasion and corrupt flows of money through its large financial services sector, but has faced resistance from some of its overseas territories because the secrecy and low taxes are what makes their finance sectors attractive.
(Reporting by Lisa Barrington; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)
