GLOBAL Financial
Integrity (GFI) has praised the UK Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, for
urging all British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to crack
down on the abuse of anonymous shell companies by creating public registries
of meaningful beneficial ownership information. The letter follows recent
moves by the UK Government, which is currently in the process of creating
the world’s first such public registry to do the same.
“Prime Minister Cameron continues to show strong leadership on this issue,”
said GFI President Raymond Baker, a longtime authority on financial crime.
“Anonymous shell companies are the number one tool for laundering the proceeds
of crime, corruption, and tax evasion. Creating public registries of the true,
human, ‘beneficial’ owners of each company-as the British government is in
the process of doing-is a common sense approach to curbing financial crime
and the tremendous flow of illegal money worldwide.”
Along with an overwhelming endorsement of public registries of corporate ownership
information by the European Parliament last month, Mr. Cameron’s letter continues
to raise pressure on the United States to follow suit.
“The
U.S. is the second easiest place in the world, next to Kenya, for someone
to create an anonymous shell company to launder illicit proceeds,” noted Heather
Lowe, GFI’s legal counsel and director of government affairs. “The White House
has repeatedly endorsed the need for legislation to ensure that beneficial
ownership information on all U.S. companies is available (at least) to law
enforcement, but the President has not yet stated the Administration’s support
for bipartisan legislation-that has been introduced in both the U.S. House
of Representatives and the U.S. Senate-which would create registries of beneficial
ownership information to do exactly that."
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