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As part of UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s effort to fight tax avoidance and evasion, the British Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories recently signed an agreement with the UK government to swiftly provide law enforcement and tax officials with information on beneficial ownership of companies.

Talking about the deal, which was struck a couple of weeks ago, Cameron said, “For the first time UK police and law enforcement will be able to see exactly who really owns and controls every company incorporated in these territories - Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Isle of Man, Jersey, the lot.”


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Greater Access to Beneficial Ownership Information in Guernsey & Jersey

Jersey’s Chief Minister, Ian Gorst, said the agreement would see that his jurisdiction, which established its central register in 1989 and has shared information with the UK National Crime Agency (NCA) for close to thirty years, quickens its “response to requests, so [it] can answer non-urgent queries in 24 hours and urgent queries in one hour.”

Gorst added, “This is in response to a need for information without delay where terrorist activities are involved, and is of particular significance in the light of recent events in Paris and Brussels.”

Geoff Cook, the Chief Executive of Jersey Finance, agreed with Gorst, saying that although the agreement “may have appeared to be a knee-jerk reaction to the Panama Papers, in fact it was an element of on-going inter-governmental work to combat financial crime, and it re-affirmed our commitment to sharing beneficial ownership information with the UK’s law enforcement agencies.”

Guernsey shared these sentiments and signed onto this faster response to request for information on beneficial ownership.

Guernsey’s Chief Minister Jonathan P. Le Tocq announced that his jurisdiction “shares the UK’s aim of enhanced timeliness of access to adequate, accurate and current beneficial ownership information in relation to Guernsey companies, the secure exchange of that information and the prevention of any possibility of tipping off, without diminishing verifiability, together with a designated team to be a point of contact for cooperation between Guernsey law and enforcement authorities and their international counterparts.”


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Bermuda Welcomes Move for Stronger Collaboration with UK Law Enforcement & Tax Authorities

Bermuda, who’s been at the forefront of these efforts, welcomed the move and agreed to extend access to its register of beneficial owners, which has in fact existed for close to seventy years.

Discussing this move, Bermuda’s Premier and Minister of National Security, Michael Dunkley, said, “The new agreement notes that the NCA can now directly approach the Bermuda central register authorities, who maintain the register on behalf of the Minister of Finance, and includes expressed reference to our leading status as the only British Overseas Territory to have a continually updated central register already in place.”


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Fully Public Beneficial Ownership Central Register is Paramount

Despite this progress, many tax justice campaigners and academics believe making beneficial ownership information available to the NCA is not enough, and the UK should pressure its seventeen Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories to make their registers publicly available to all.

For instance, Christian Aid’s Toby Quantrill said about the deal, “The prime minister himself knows that central registers do not solve the problem and that to curb the sort of activities exposed in the Panama Papers, the public, journalists and other businesses must be able to see those registers.”

Charlie Matthews, Action Aid’s Tax Advocacy Adviser, agreed that these measures are not enough to curtail tax avoidance and evasion in the UK’s Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories.

Matthews stated that these “proposals will not be enough to curb the massive corporate tax avoidance connected to UK-linked tax havens like the British Virgin Islands."

On the other hand, Dr. Jason Sharman, a Professor at Griffith University’s Center for Governance and Public Policy in Australia, believes a public central register of beneficial ownership may not be the best option to fight tax avoidance and evasion.

In a paper commissioned by Jersey Finance, Sharman argues “there is comparatively little evidence of how centralised registries would work in practice, thanks to their current novelty and rarity.”

He adds, “On the basis of available evidence, it is simply not possible to say that centralised registries work better than the leading alternative [regulated Corporate Service Providers], and it is demonstrably wrong to say that they are the only way of achieving corporate transparency.”

All of this movement comes a few weeks prior to a massive anti-corruption summit to be hosted by Cameron in London on May 12th and which aims to gather world leaders and prominent business people to find better ways to fight corruption.