Barbados does not support a public register of beneficial owners of enterprises.
Making this clear while opening the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP) Caribbean Conference, Minister of Industry, International Business, Commerce and Small Business Development, Donville Inniss, forecasted that there would soon be a focus on developing programmes or policy perspectives on a public register for the beneficial owners of businesses, “under the guise that such a practice will help eliminate corruption and other illicit activities of corporations”.
However, he challenged this position.
“As I have had to say to my counterparts in the British Government and my colleagues in the Global Forum, Barbados does not support a public register of beneficial owners of enterprises. To do such would place the lives and well-being of private citizens at great risk and only create a more underground market for some kind of corporate structures. I look forward to the position of the US Government, in particular,” he said.
Addressing the audience gathered at the Hilton Barbados on Monday, he reiterated his stance on the blacklisting of Barbados and other small island states by international agencies and called for transparency.
“Many of us have been erroneously placed on various kinds of negative lists and as a result have been forced to spend much of our limited resources on getting struck off the said lists. We have become victims of overly zealous regulators who spend every waking moment making up new rules, for example, for commercial banks, who are then compelled to create and sustain large risks and compliance departments to focus on making life a living hell for even the best governed corporations or the most legitimate high net worth person. We in the Caribbean, for example, have severely felt the effects of de-risking,” he said.
Inniss added, “As we continue to engage with the EU, the OECD and our partners around the world, we do so with a firm determination that there must be transparency in rule setting and there must be consistency in the application of such rules. We must not settle for anything less than that.”