On 24 November, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held its private sector consultative forum on beneficial ownership of legal persons, which focused on Recommendation 24 Transparency and beneficial ownership of legal persons of the FATF Recommendations. FATF stated that it is undergoing a major review of this area, which may lead to a comprehensive overhaul of the system of beneficial ownership to address issues such as inconsistencies across many countries, privacy concerns, centralised registries, legitimate purposes for access, and how information should be verified.
The forum was divided into two sessions with the first being chaired by Jennie Haslett and featuring Maira Martini, Transparency International; Jason Sharman, University of Cambridge; and John Cusack, the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime. The panel gave a third-party view with the aim of defining and understanding the nature and scale of problem. The following challenges were identified by the panel:
- the quality of the information and how it is being verified;
- the importance of flexibility and adapting requirements to the risk of the jurisdiction (as it was stated that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work);
- that rather than implementing new laws, existing ones should be properly enforced; and
- the need for increased collaboration between all players.
The second panel was chaired by Alexandra Kadet and featured Young Led, Department of Treasury, USA; Michela Maggi, European Commission; and Mariano Garcia Fresno, Ministry of Justice, Spain. The panel shared its views on the effectiveness of the measures being implemented and the potential problems and solutions. The discussion focused on who should have access to beneficial ownership information, the balance between what needs to stay private and what can be made available, the challenge faced when involving legal entities outside of the EU, and the need to have it centralised.
The overarching consensus from the forum was that this is a very challenging issue with no perfect solutions. FATF confirmed that a number of significant challenges were identified that needed to be addressed, such as complacency among some gatekeepers, the need for discrepancy reporting to make sure registers don’t work in isolation, consequences for non-compliance, and the need for consistency of global standards and practice.
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