Addressing the EU parliament, commissioner Věra Jourová described progress by the 20 countries as “slow and unsatisfactory”.
Jourová did not name the member states that failed to meet the 26 June 2017 deadline for implementing the directive.
Emily Osborne, a private client practitioner and partner at Stephenson Harwood, said it highlighted the plight of the British Overseas Territories which are set to have public registers imposed upon them by the UK.
“Why, when 20 EU states have not implemented beneficial ownership registers, as required under the 4th Anti-Money Laundering directive, does the UK insist that the overseas territories must have fully transparent registers?” she said.
In May, Cayman Island’s premier Alden McLaughlin summed up the mood in the territories, saying the public register was constitutional overreach and “reminiscent of the worst injustices of a bygone era of colonial despotism”.
Crown dependencies
Last month, the UK authors of the beneficial owners register bill, Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell and Labour MP Margaret Hodge, visited the Isle of Man to push “the case for a public register”.
“We would hope to persuade the Isle of Man authorities that it is a good idea,” newspaper Isle of Man Today quoted Mitchell as saying at the time.
Speaking to firms on the island, International Adviser understands interest in making their register public is lukewarm. Finance professionals observed that the island already has a register which can be interrogated by regulators and law enforcement.
The crown dependencies, which include Jersey and Guernsey, have a different constitutional relationship with the UK compared to the overseas territories and, like the Isle of Man, are less interested in opening their registers up to the public until it becomes a global standard.
