Anti-corruption: Beneficial Ownership Registration

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

My Lords, there are two parts to the question: what are we doing about public registers of beneficial ownerships, particularly in our Overseas Territories? First, we should acknowledge that we made huge progress in getting them to have registers at all in some cases. All the Overseas Territories and Crown dependencies will share information with our tax and law enforcement agencies. As regards the tower mentioned by the noble Lord, the Prime Minister made a commitment at the anti-corruption summit that we will have the first public register of foreign-owned companies owning property in this country, and that will apply not only to new but to existing ownership by foreign-owned companies. It will also apply to a public register of public contracting. Lastly, I should say that, as a result of the anti-corruption summit, 12 countries have either agreed or are agreeing to have public registers.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, can the Minister explain what sovereignty means in terms of our sovereignty over the Overseas Territories? The Prime Minister declared last year that we were pushing them to have public registers giving full transparency of beneficial ownership, and the Minister has now kindly said that we are making good progress towards accepting that our tax authorities can have access to them. That is half way there. If these areas are under British sovereignty and benefit from the recognition of UK law and UK accountancy, surely we have the right in certain instances to tell them what has to be done.

[Lord Ashton of Hyde]

The noble Lord is absolutely correct that in the last resort we could do so, but these are democracies and we think it is better that they agree to do things rather than we dictate to them, which is a rather 19th century attitude. At the same time, we acknowledge that we would like to have public registers and we are trying to persuade them on that. As I say, 12 countries have agreed so far, so we are making progress.