Transparency International UK | By: Jameela Raymond | GPE – October 10, 2017:
In 2016 the UK’s Overseas Territories (OTs) and Crown Dependencies (CDs) committed to introduce central registers of beneficial ownership information or ‘similarly effective systems’ by 30 June 2017. Governments have made public statements acknowledging that verified information on company beneficial ownership can be used effectively to detect and fight corruption, but these registers and systems do not meet the gold standard of public registers that then Prime Minister David Cameron called for. Even for those OTs and CDs that have fulfilled their commitments, there is still a lot of work to be done.
What is the problem?
Originally published July 20, 2017: There is growing evidence that the UK’s Overseas Territories’ (OTs) and Crown Dependencies’ (CDs) financial systems are widely used in money laundering and grand corruption cases.
More than 70% of corruption cases surveyed by the World Bank between 1980 and 2010 relied on anonymously-owned companies help to obscure what they were doing, and the UK’s OTs were the most popular destination for the corrupt to hide their illicit wealth.
75% of UK properties under investigation for corruption in a recent 10 year period were registered with offshore companies. The opacity in these secrecy jurisdictions has been cited as a strategic risk to the UK, and for too long there has been resistance to increasing transparency over corporate entities registered within them.
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