Roger Godsiff – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Roger Godsiff on 2016-03-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, which overseas territories and crown dependencies have published registries of the beneficial ownership of the legally registered companies that are conducting business through their jurisdictions.

James Duddridge

I had productive discussions with Overseas Territories leaders in December when they agreed to hold beneficial ownership information in their respective jurisdictions via central registers or similarly effective systems. This is an important step forward. We further agreed that we should develop a timely, safe and secure information exchange process to increase our collective effectiveness for the purposes of law enforcement. The Overseas Territories have had productive technical discussions with UK officials and have expressed their willingness to work with us to stamp out criminal financing. I want to see significant progress ahead of the May Anti-Corruption Summit.

The Government is also in dialogue with the Crown Dependencies on this issue.