UK to have beneficial ownership register

The UK will require overseas territories to:

1. Allow HMRC access to company beneficial ownership information without restriction

2. Competent authorities should be able to quickly identify all companies that a particular beneficial owner has a stake in without needing to submit multiple and repeated requests and

3. Companies or their beneficial owners must not be alerted to the fact that an investigation is under way.

The majority of overseas territories and the Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man have indicated that the do not wish to hold central registers.

In a separate statement, the UK Prime Minister David Cameron has made a further commitment to central registers of the ownership of companies and trusts. It reiterates that the UK will have a central register of beneficiaries of trusts that produce UK tax consequences, to be immediately available to the UK authorities, as a well as a central publicly available register of company beneficial ownership. The trust register is likely to be based on tax filings, including filings for automatic exchange of information (AEOI) purposes. ”