Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether the Government is assessing the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of the EU template for public country-by-country reporting.

Knowing who ultimately owns and controls a company is a crucial part of the global fight against corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing. The UK is leading by example and our freely accessible public register of company beneficial ownership went live in June 2016.

Last year, the UK co-launched a ground breaking new initiative with the EU G5 for the systematic exchange of beneficial ownership information. Since launching the initiative, over 50 countries, including all of the Crown Dependencies and relevant Overseas Territories, have signed up.

Building on the success of that multilateral approach, the UK is now pushing for multilateral agreement on a model of public country-by-country reporting (CBCR).

It is important that there is a level of international support and co-ordination that leads to both domestic and foreign headquartered groups being required to report information for a comprehensive range of countries in which they operate.

That is necessary to ensure that public CBCR meets its objective and to avoid the initiative distorting business decisions on their group structure and headquarter location.

The UK is, as part of this, engaging constructively with the European Commission proposal for public CBCR.

That includes the high-level aims of the Directive, and the more detailed aspects of the Directive that are alluded to in the question, on which discussions are still ongoing.