MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
PM Cameron calls on BOT to have public registries with names of companies' owners
“Improving the transparency of company ownership” is vital to meeting the urgent challenges of illicit finance and tax evasion, said Cameron British Prime Minister David Cameron has written to the leaders of the UK’s overseas territories and crown dependencies to encourage them to create public registries that would reveal the true owners of companies registered in their jurisdictions.
“I believe that beneficial ownership and public access to a central register is key to improving the transparency of company ownership and vital to meeting the urgent challenges of illicit finance and tax evasion,” Cameron wrote in Friday’s letter.
“By leading the world on this agenda we are taking an important step in promoting strong and transparent corporate governance in the UK and around the world,” Cameron added.
The letter comes less than a week after the UK’s Department for Business, Industry and Skills (BIS) published the details of the UK’s plans to create a public register of the beneficial owners of UK-registered companies.
Governments in most advanced economies are short of tax revenue after the financial crisis, and pressure has been growing on small territories with big banking sectors to lift bank secrecy and do more to combat tax dodging and money laundering.
British overseas territories and crown dependencies and which enjoy self-government, are often labelled ‘tax havens’ by both the media and transparency campaigners, much to the displeasure of their leaders.
Development agency Christian Aid said in a statement that it was “extremely pleased” to see Cameron’s letter encouraging the UK’s tax havens to create public beneficial ownership registries.
“If these territories want to shake off the label of ‘tax haven’, then now is the time for them to do it,” said Barry Johnston, Senior UK Political Adviser at Christian Aid.
British overseas territories include Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos Islands while crown dependencies include Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.
Top Comments
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Read all commentsso the useless fatty guy thinks that the world will change their opinion about british colonies because of a registry?
Apr 26th, 2014 - 06:25 pm 0there are more “companies” (lol) in gibraltar than llanitos...
each llanito would have to have +/- 100 “companies”.
british colonies are just tax havens and smugglers paradises.
a simply registry cannot change a sh*t
Just because he is the useless fatty guy to you,
Apr 26th, 2014 - 07:03 pm 0to him, you are his fried,
he has stated this publicly,
we are all in this together, Ah Friends ..lol
Camoron has not held a real job in his life unless you count “marketing”.
Apr 26th, 2014 - 10:20 pm 0What he knows about company and accounts transparency could be written on the back of his hand, which was probably the case for this interview.
Has he never heard of “silent proxies”.
Dear me, and he is the Prime Minister: unbelievable.
And don’t you just love paullita? An argie attempting to lecture the UK on company probity? Just remind me what position The Dark Country is in the corruption perceptions index 2013?
http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2013/results/
With score of ZERO / 100 being the most corrupt, and a ranking out of 177 (the LOWEST number being the LEAST corrupt) The Dark Country has a score of 34 at position 106/177. In 2012 they had a score of 36 so they have gotten MORE corrupt. Who’d have thunk it!
The UK has a score of 76 and a position of 14/177. In 2012 the score was 74 so they have improved!
So paullita, I told you at each post you made you would look a bigger idiot and all we would do is laugh MORE at you. Thanks for proving me correct. Ha, ha, ha......you know the rest.
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