On Friday (22 April) HM Treasury announced that a further 19 countries have now joined the UK-led pilot project launched with Germany, France, Italy and Spain for the automatic exchange of information on beneficial ownership. These include the Netherlands; Romania; Sweden; Finland; Slovakia; Latvia; Croatia; Belgium; Ireland; Slovenia; Denmark; Malta; Lithuania; Cyprus; Bulgaria; Portugal; Estonia; Greece; and Czech Republic.

Following this, the Informal ECOFIN meeting of finance ministers of all 28 EU member states ahead of the Netherlands Presidency announced that they welcomed the fact that ‘all member states’ will enter into a pilot project for the automatic exchange of information on ultimate beneficial owners. In addition, they also announced that the Netherlands Presidency will take forward and broaden the work on the amendment to the 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (which will be submitted to the European Parliament and the Council in June). Ministers encouraged the Commission to ‘consider improvements to address certain issues linked specifically to money laundering, in particular to enhance accessibility of beneficial ownership registers on corporate and other legal entities, as well as on trusts and similar legal arrangements, to clarify the registration requirements for trusts, to speed up the interconnection of national beneficial ownership registers, promote automatic exchange of information on beneficial ownership between authorities, and strengthen customer due diligence rules.’

At the recent FATF meeting in Vienna that STEP attended there also growing pressure from the banks to allow them access to any beneficial ownership registers, even if the general public is not allowed access.

Add all this to the announcement from the OECD that the G20 has asked the Global Forum and the FATF ‘to make initial proposals by October 2016 on ways to improve the implementation of the international standards on transparency, including on the availability of beneficial ownership information and its international exchange’ and it is clear that international policy agenda has shifted fundamentally since the ‘Panama Papers’ story broke, and few would rule out it shifting further still as more leaks emerge.

We suspect many people will be struggling to keep up with the sheer volume and speed of the announcements now coming out in the area of transparency. To this end we are therefore very fortunate to have the head of CRS implementation at the OECD and a leading spokesman from Transparency International, as well as leading practitioners, joining us for in-depth discussion on these issues at the STEP Global Congress in Amsterdam on June 30- 1 July. This will no doubt provide crucial insight into just what is the end game, and how we can move forward.

George Hodgson is Deputy Chief Executive of STEP