At the summit meeting in 2013, the members of the G8 group (including the United Kingdom) committed to introducing national action plans implementing the FATF’s recommendations on transparency and beneficial ownership, the intention being to combat the misuse of companies for money laundering and terrorist financing purposes. Companies, it was declared, “should know who really owns them and tax collectors and law enforcers should be able to obtain this information easily”.
In 2016, the Governments of the UK and the Isle of Man (IOM) made commitments to improve law enforcement cooperation between the two jurisdictions over the sharing of beneficial ownership information. The IOM undertook to establish a central database of the beneficial owners of companies to be held by the IOM Companies Registry and overseen by the IOM Financial Services Authority (FSA). As a result, the Beneficial Ownership Act 2017 (BOA) came into force in the IOM on 21 June 2017 and the new central database for storing information collected under its provisions (Database) was launched on 1 July 2017.
