Beneficial Ownership Registers: The STEP Handbook for Advisers

Beneficial Ownership Registers is a timely and important new resource for practitioners across a wide range of disciplines who find themselves grappling with the complexities of identifying their clients and meeting anti‑money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) compliance requirements. It is a multi‑author work and the reader can rely with complete confidence on their expertise.

It describes itself as a handbook for advisors and expounds the application in concrete legislative terms of international regulations that, by their all‑embracing nature, have a tendency towards abstraction.

The purpose of its authors is not, therefore, to give an academic critique of the beneficial ownership registration regime, but the book is not too shy to point out the limitations of that regime and the difficulties that practitioners will experience, faced with a growing global industry in beneficial ownership avoidance structures, as well as plain old‑fashioned skulduggery:

‘Those whose intentions are to commit crime or finance terrorism do so by concealing their identity and lying to achieve that goal. The effectiveness of central registers that record the names of registered owners may, in certain circumstances, be of limited utility in actually achieving the registers’ goals, especially if those filing the information are disposed to conceal their identity.’ — John Riches TEP and Eleanor Riches‑Lenaghan.

In particular, the awkwardness of applying the description ‘beneficial owner’ to Anglo‑Saxon trusts, and of identifying trustees, protectors and beneficiaries as coming within this category – something born of a European civil‑law mindset and wholly at odds with the equitable principles on which trusts are founded – is made apparent.

The opening chapters are by the book’s consulting editor Paolo Panico TEP, alongside John Riches TEP and Eleanor Riches‑Lenaghan. They set EU beneficial ownership registration regulations in their historical and contemporary context (the EU’s Fourth and Fifth Anti‑Money Laundering Directives). The country chapters cover some, but not all, of the 27 EU Member States (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain). However, the materials are not confined to the EU and include the UK, the Crown Dependencies, Liechtenstein and the US.

It is to be hoped that this book will become a standard work of reference, updated to include all 27 EU Member States and reissued on a regular basis, so as to enhance in this fast‑changing field the clarity and comprehensiveness that this first edition enjoys.

ISBN: 9781787424142

Price: GBP175

Publisher: Globe Law and Business