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UK legislates to make colonial UBO registers public

Chris Hamblin, Editor, London, 8 May 2018

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Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the Turks & Caicos Islands, among other British overseas territories, will have to make their registers of beneficial ownership available to the public if and when the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill becomes law in its present form.

This stems from a recent amendment to the Bill in the House of Commons. The Government introduced the Bill in October and it now goes to the House of Lords. Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are not affected as they are Crown Dependencies with a different constitutional status.

HM Government has also published a policy note about exceptions and licences. In it, it looks forward to the UK's departure from the European Union and states: "The Bill will enable us to carve out exceptions [presumably banned by the EU at present] to actions prohibited by [EU and United Nations] sanctions, for example humanitarian activity carried out by NGOs [charities] in sanctioned countries and to issue general and specific licences for organisations operating in sanctioned countries in certain circumstances. This will allow us to do more than is currently possible when we create UK autonomous regimes and is an improvement on current practice, where the use of general licences has been limited by EU law."

On the subject of freezing assets, the Government plans to stick to the same regime as today, preserving something it calls "existing licensing grounds." It also intends to use general licences for issues that are urgent; or issues that it could not foresee at the time of drafting; or issues that "need to be time-limited." This might happen in circumstances where it is following an unrelated financial services policy that UN/EU sanctions threaten to hinder.

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