The glittering towers and spartan offices of this international financial capital hold billions of illicit offshore dollars — money belonging to countless anonymous company owners who came here to evade taxes and finance fraud, money laundering and terrorism.

That established model of corporate concealment, adopted by Canada, has met its end in Britain.

Last June, Britain became the world leader in exposing tax cheats by requiring corporate registrations to include the names of the real company owners — or “persons with significant control” — and listing the records in a database that anyone can view for free online.

The British model, while still new, has been hailed as groundbreaking for disarming the most essential weapon for tax evaders: secrecy.

“The objective is to drive illicit money out of the U.K.,” says Donald Toon, the U.K.’s economic crime director. “A publicly open accessible register is valuable. It is valuable because of transparency.”

Britian’s top financial crime cop considers corporate ownership secrecy, “a threat to the economic security of the U.K.”

The Canadian government has displayed no such sense of urgency.

In Canada’s federal and provincial corporate registries, it is difficult — often impossible — to identify the real owners of companies if they choose to hide behind lawyers, accountants or straw-man directors. It’s the same kind of corporate secrecy that lures money launderers, tax evaders, drug traffickers and embezzlers to offshore tax havens such as Panama, Seychelles and the British Virgin Islands.

Canada’s growing reputation as a tax haven has consequences, say experts, including attracting money from criminals and injecting unrestrained foreign investment into real-estate markets that drives up housing costs beyond the reach of many Canadians.

Lessons From London: The UK cracked down on secretive shell companies, but experts say Canada attracts tax cheats and criminals because we still allow them.

Here’s how it works: Let’s say you’re a foreign businessperson looking to evade taxes and hide any connection to money flowing into your company.

You may well want to run that cash through an anonymous shell company registered in a place that doesn’t require you to list your name on any public document, file taxes or keep any financial records.

Ontario is perfect.

Ontario limited partnerships have become a go-to corporate structure for hiding international wealth legally thanks to a secretive business registration and regulations that are being used in ways the province never intended.

“Canada is one of the most opaque jurisdictions, globally, in terms of identifying corporate ownership,” says Peter Dent, a forensic accountant and past chair of Transparency International Canada. “Canada is increasingly becoming an attractive jurisdiction for individuals that want to hide their money or their assets.”

Dent’s investigations tracing the identities of anonymous corporate owners behind Canadian companies are often stymied by secrecy, he says.

“I’d say it’s more than 50 per cent of the time I run into brick walls,” says Dent. “We’ve heard complaints about law enforcement not being able to uncover or to properly investigate many transactions . . . because they can’t find out the true owners of certain companies . . . So you’d think that it’s in the best interest of government to have a more transparent system of identifying who are the true owners of a company.”

“Canada is one of the most opaque jurisdictions, globally, in terms of identifying corporate ownership”

Countries around the world are wrestling to close the regulatory black holes that facilitate tax evasion in the aftermath of the Panama Papers revelations, based on the leak of 11.5 million documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared in Canada with the Star and the CBC.

Britain, once heavily criticized for failing to control its overseas territories such as the British Virgin Islands, Jersey and the Isle of Man, chose the right target for rooting out tax cheats, says Robert Palmer, who runs the anti-money laundering arm of the U.K. research group Global Witness.

“Secrecy is at the heart of financial crime,” he says. “You can create a company overnight and that company can own assets, have bank accounts, employ people, own property. And you can create a structure to make it impossible to determine who is behind that company. Nominees and straw men who are on paper as shareholders just take instructions from someone else and it’s very, very hard to trace the corporate hierarchy.”

Former British business secretary Vince Cable, an architect of the British public registry, says his government acted because the country was “in danger of attracting bad people with bad money.”

“Russian oligarchs for an example, they did acquire quite substantial companies here,” says Cable, who took on powerful corporate interests in the City of London to create the registry.

“Britain has taken the lead and now it is reasonable to expect for other countries like Canada to look at the experience and see if it has improved things. And if it has improved things, they should follow suit.”

The newly introduced British transparency model isn’t perfect. It does not apply to British tax-haven territories, although it has created moral suasion that has inspired greater co-operation with law enforcement requests for financial records, says the U.K.’s Toon.

“Are we in a position where, if you are a determined, effective criminal, we’ll make it impossible for you to run a company? No, we’re not. But we’ll make it harder, we’ll make it more awkward for you and to some extent, if that means that you don’t register your company in the U.K., don’t operate it in the U.K. and you go somewhere else, that is a success,” he says.