Catherine West – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Catherine West on 2016-01-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, what plans he has to help persuade Overseas Territories leaders to make registers of beneficial ownership publicly available.

James Duddridge

The Government is in discussion with the governments of the Overseas Territories on their plans to improve company transparency. The Territories have agreed to hold beneficial ownership information in central registers, or similarly effective systems, which need to meet the three criteria the UK set out in a letter to Territory leaders in March 2015. These are laid out in the answer my hon. Friend, the Member for South West Hertfordshire (David Gauke MP), gave on 16 October 2015 (PQ10437, PQ10438 and PQ10448).