OECD’s Pascal Saint-Amans says efforts to improve sharing of information between countries must go further

Police and tax inspectors must be able to discover who sits behind opaque corporate trusts if international efforts to fight tax dodging and corruption in the wake of the Panama Papers scandal are to prove effective, one of the world’s top tax reformers has warned.

Pascal Saint-Amans, head of tax at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), said existing efforts to improve the sharing of information between countries – championed by David Cameron – needed to go further.



In particular, he said countries needed to look again at new registers of company ownership, suggesting these should be improved and expanded. One of his proposals is that as well as recording the beneficial owner of each company, these registers should also show similar information for trusts.



An effective regime, Saint-Amans told the Guardian, “will definitely require improved availability of, and access to, information on beneficial owners of all legal arrangements – including trusts”.

Trusts are particularly controversial because they can be used to create questionable tax structures, to hide corrupt activities or to facilitate money laundering. They are a feature of many common law jurisdictions, and have proved especially popular in the offshore world.

Saint-Amans’s comments highlight how isolated the UK has become in its insistence that trusts be largely excluded from international efforts to bring transparency to the most secretive corners of the corporate world. In 2013, Cameron wrote to top European officials making the case for trusts to be exempted from rules, then being drawn up in Brussels, requiring companies to report who they are owned by.



He wrote: “[Ownership] registries will … enable law enforcement and tax authorities to access, discreetly and at short notice, critical information for cross-border investigations.



“It is clearly important we recognise the important differences between companies and trusts. This means that the solution for addressing the potential misuse of companies – such as [ownership] registries – may well not be appropriate generally.”

After pressure from the UK, it was agreed that only those trusts which “generate tax consequences” should be subject to the new Brussels directive. Most tax experts agree this loose wording effectively releases many of the more controversial trusts – especially those offshore – from ownership disclosure requirements.



In the wake of the series of scandals exposed in the Panama Papers, the UK has led international calls for greater information sharing. Together with France, Germany, Spain and Italy, the UK responded with plans to open up their ownership register to one another’s investigative authorities.

In April, the chancellor, George Osborne, said this information sharing initiative was “a hammer blow against those that would illegally evade taxes and hide their wealth in the dark corners of the financial system”.



It remains to be seen whether a new UK prime minister will continue Cameron’s efforts to win international consensus on the best way to fight offshore corruption. But last week, the UK became the first major economy to require all companies registered here to state their true ownership in filings at Companies House.



Many other large countries are developing similar registers to record company ownership, but have stopped short of making that information public. More than 20 countries have joined the new European initiative allowing police and tax inspectors from each jurisdiction to access one another’s ownership register. They include Gibraltar, Cyprus and the Isle of Man.

Despite pressure from the UK, however, many other countries – including some crown dependencies and overseas territories – have resisted pressure to set up ownership registers.



Saint-Amans and other experts at combating offshore corruption and money laundering are expected to report to the G20 in October. A highly influential figure in international corporate reforms, he spent the last three years leading a G20-commissioned reform programme to end tax loopholes in international rules exploited by some of the world’s largest corporations, including Google, Amazon, Vodafone and Starbucks.