Islands agree wider access to registers of ownership
Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man have committed to the UK government to do more to improve access to information from registers of beneficial ownership to meet its new plans for interim progress.
Yesterday the three Crown Dependencies published a joint commitment ‘to increase transparency and accessibility’ on local registers, but stopped short of full accessibility to the current register. It updated a previous commitment given in 2019.
The three islands are moving to provide access to financial services business who need to conduct customer due diligence, known as ‘obliged entities’, and to media and civil society organisations who can demonstrate ‘a legitimate interest’ in accessing relevant information to combat financial crime.
It proved to be the final act carried out by Deputy Peter Ferbrache in his role as the island’s chief minister.
‘We are moving together to swift, but realistic, implementation time-scales,’ he said.
‘The islands share the vital global objective of all responsible jurisdictions to combat financial crime in all its forms.’
The islands have held back on delivering on the commitment to open up registers in some way, following decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights from 12 months ago, which recognised the incompatibility with public access with the right to privacy.
The three islands said that they had undertaken substantial preparatory work to enable ‘obliged entity’ access, and said it would now be implemented before the end of 2024, with appropriate safeguards to manage effectively any interference with privacy rights.
Work will now be done on defining ‘legitimate interest’ access, in line with international obligations, by the fourth quarter of 2024 at the latest. Once agreed, implementation should follow in a reasonable time-frame.
The commitment was clear to state the ‘crucial balance’ between protecting human rights and combating financial crime.
‘We have a long-standing and independently verified track record of meeting international standards,’ the Crown Dependencies’ statement said.
‘We are proud of our global leadership in tax cooperation, in combating money laundering and in countering the financing of terrorism and proliferation financing. We will continue to provide appropriate and effective transparency which can support those critical objectives.’
The islands have repeatedly insisted that their public registers provide the best, validated and up-to-date information, which was more crucial than the self-supplied and often out of date information made publicly available on the UK register.
The House of Commons last week debated the issue of public access to registers, when an interim solution for ‘limited access’ was announced, given that all the Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, bar Gibraltar, were missing the deadline of the end of 2023.
