The British government is failing to live up to promises to tackle corruption, according to the chair of the international development committee, Stephen Twigg.

On Monday the government rejected recommendations made by the international development committee (IDC) in the wake of a major anti-corruption summit hosted in London last year by the former prime minister David Cameron. These included the introduction of country-by-country reporting of multinationals’ profits and payments.

The government also disagreed with other recommendations made by the IDC in its October 2016 report, Tackling corruption overseas, such as reconsidering the role of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as the principle international forum for discussions and decisions on tax.

In its response to the report, the government rejected the assertion that it was failing to persuade UK overseas territories that they should create public registers to end tax secrecy. It insisted that almost all relevant overseas territories and crown dependencies have given their support to an initiative launched by the UK for the development of a new global standard on automatic exchange of beneficial ownership information between countries.

Twigg said that the UK Department for International Development (DfID) was working hard to respond to the challenges corruption presents in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the world, in places such as South Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan.



“Unfortunately, the wider government seems to be falling short of the promises it made at the anti-corruption summit last May,” he said.

“Progress on the overseas territories has stalled, with the government showing it has no intention to lobby further for public registers of beneficial ownership.



“It is also disappointing that the government will not be making public the information it holds on how much profit UK-headquartered multinationals are making overseas and what payments they are making to national governments. Without this, citizens of developing countries will continue to be left in the dark about the extent to which corporations are able to make vast profits without paying the appropriate levels of tax.”

The committee warned last year that a lack of transparency in Britain’s overseas territories – nominally still under the UK’s auspices, but in practice self-ruled and sometimes operating as controversial tax havens – will continue to damage Britain’s reputation as a leader on anti-corruption.

Attempts by DfID to reduce corruption in developing countries were also in danger of being undermined by a lack of policy coherence and the pursuit of different policies by other sections of government, the MPs found.

At the summit last year, Cameron called corruption “the cancer at the heart of so many of the problems we need to tackle in our world”.



Britain was among six countries – along with Afghanistan, Kenya, France, the Netherlands and Nigeria – to agree to publish registers of who owns companies in their territories.