A panel discussion at the Jersey Finance Private Client Conference on Tuesday revealed equal measures of cynicism and positivity towards the proposals, which would require all information about bank accounts to be made publically available.
In the panel, David McNair, head of growth, equity and livelihoods at Save the Children UK, said that public transparency was necessary in the elimination of fraud.
“We need to follow the money because the truth is that it ends up in secret bank accounts in wealthy countries,” he said. “We think that there is power in having the ownership of bank accounts in the public domain.
“We need debt to be in the public domain for avoidance and fraud issues to get sorted. There are a lot of jurisdictions that need a lot of progress.
“It is not about covering everyone regardless of the worries they have it is about protecting the public. Having the information in the public is critical.”
'Breaching people's right to privacy'
But Alan Binnington, private client director of RBC Wealth Management’s fiduciary services business, argued that the information on the UK list would be of a very dubious quality.
“Jurisdictions like the UK have a lot of catching up to do before they can produce information that is of any use to anyone,” he said. “Someone has to stand for the individual right to privacy.
“If you live in an unsafe place then you will probably not want to keep all your assets in a public register.
“There are lots of reasons that people want to keep things private and there are a lot of other ways that we can protect from wrongdoing other than breaching people’s right to privacy.”
In a separate discussion, Richard Corrigan, deputy chief executive officer at Jersey Finance, doubted the immediate reality of complete transparency, but admitted that the solution may ultimately lie with the US Government's FATCA initiative.
“Non-Governmental Organisations would like to track individual people and eradicate the problem by creating absolute transparency throughout Jersey. But in reality this is an oversimplification because tax frauds would simply set up accounts in less regulated parts of the world.
“We need to get a worldwide standard on transparency, and in a sense FATCA is achieving this as a variety of countries are beginning to agree on information exchange. It has become bigger than originally thought.
He said public registers should not be imposed on compliant clients, and could in fact be seen as an infringement on basic human rights.
“In cases of concealment and criminality Jersey will cooperate with the tracking and identification process. However, we do not believe that it should be public in general. Everyone has a right to privacy that this register would remove.
“People who do not have their privacy will move somewhere else, and those who are not playing by the rules will not be deterred as they would not have got into Jersey anyway.
He also said the public nature of the register would contradict the intentions of those who move their money into anonymity for reasons of safety, and that as a result they will end up taking their business to less regulated areas where they can remain unknown.
“We are not against transparency," he said. "We reserve the right for everyone to do their banking in private and we believe in compliant confidentiality.”
“If you have banked and earned your money in a compliant manner then you should be granted the right to structure that money in private. If you haven’t, then you will face repercussions regardless of publicity.”
In a letter to the crown dependencies last month, the prime minister praised the developments in transparency in Jersey and Guernsey before emphasising the general importance of publically accessible central registers of beneficial ownerships.
In the letter, Cameron said he looked forward to introducing a publically accessible central domestic registry as soon as possible through UK legislation.
He also applauded overseas territories that had been promoting high international standards since last year’s G8 agenda on tax and transparency.
