OTs still face UK demands for beneficial ownership access
Cayman Premier Alden McLaughlin (left) and Bermuda Premier Michael Dunkley
(CNS): The Cayman Islands premier has said that Britain will be putting its overseas territories under pressure to create some kind of beneficial ownership register when the OT leaders meet in London later this year. Speaking in Bermuda at the end of last week following a meeting with the leaders of other OTs, Alden McLaughlin said that even though the UK elections were over, the pressure to meet the demands for open access to information by, at the very least, enforcement authorities had not gone away.
Video footage supplied by the Bermudian media of a press conference last week at the end of the Pre-Joint Ministerial Council meeting reveals that beneficial ownership issue will again be on the agenda in London at the Overseas Territories Joint Ministerial Council meeting to be hosted by the UK Government later this year. The matter was left unresolved last year, and although fighting the perception of tax evasion by European companies in offshore financial centres is no longer an election theme, the territories are not off the hook.
“The ministers … on that occasion … were trying to pressure premiers and chief ministers (in the OTs) into agreeing to a communique,” he said. “Now that the elections have passed obviously the pressure is not as great but there is no question that the overseas territories are going to be required to establish some kind of platform by which UK law enforcement and tax regulatory authorities have access.”
Printing OT passports in the UK, the need for one voice and testing the definition of partnership between the UK and its territories as well as talking to the right UK ministers about the right issues were matters raised by the ministers at last week’s gathering.
Category: Finance, Financial Services
