Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will set a deadline for the UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to make public their central registers of beneficial ownership.

The UK Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies are separate jurisdictions with their own democratically elected governments. The UK Government works closely with the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies on transparency issues. Our priority is the implementation of the new bilateral arrangements concluded with them in 2016. Under these arrangements, the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies have committed to establish, where they have not already done so, central registers of beneficial ownership information or similarly effective systems and to give UK law enforcement and tax authorities near real-time access to beneficial ownership information on corporate and legal entities incorporated in their jurisdictions. Nevertheless, it remains the Government’s ambition for public registers to become the global standard. If this happens, we would expect the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to follow suit.