Companies would be forced to disclose their ultimate owners on a public European Union-wide register under plans being pushed by European Parliament lawmakers to tackle money laundering, tax evasion and terrorism.
Krisjanis Karins, a Latvian legislator in the assembly’s center-right group leading work on the file, said that the parliament would fight to have the public register on “beneficial ownership” included in updated EU rules to tackle money laundering and terrorist financing.
“This is one of the rare instances in the parliament where there is unity across all political lines and member-state affiliations,” Karins said
in an interview. “The aim is to discover who is the beneficial owner of entities across the EU.”
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron is among leaders to call for measures to tackle tax evasion and other offenses using shell companies. While the EU’s 28 national governments reached an agreement in June to set up their own data banks on “beneficial ownership” of companies, the EU parliament wants to go further and have a central EU-wide register, Karins said.
“This is something that wouldn’t just have benefits in terms of uncovering crime, but also exposing tax fraud,” he said in a telephone interview from Strasbourg. “You would be able to see more clearly if an entity is paying tax exactly where it should be paying tax.”
Italy, which holds the rotating presidency of the EU, and the parliament, are discussing what measures should be adopted for showing who really owns and profits from a company as part of a broader overhaul of the bloc’s rules to counter money laundering and terrorist financing.
The update was proposed last year by Michel Barnier, the EU’s financial-services chief, and requires approval by governments and the parliament to take effect.
The Group of Eight nations reached a deal last year to push ahead with steps to bolster information on beneficial ownership.
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