Reported by: Dean Starkman

The Swiss government plans to create a central registry to identify the true owners of now-anonymous Swiss-registered companies and partnerships, an incremental but important anti-money laundering reform for the longtime bastion of financial secrecy.

The country’s Federal Council, Switzerland’s cabinet, has asked the government’s finance ministry to draft a law to create the new registry by next June.

The council said in a statement that the ministry would also  assess whether “further adjustments should be made to the anti-money laundering toolkit.”

It noted  that, “a growing number of countries around the world – including all EU member states – are turning to register-based solutions to increase the transparency of legal entities.”

But Switzerland faced criticism from transparency activists for saying the registry would not be publicly accessible but only available to “relevant authorities.”

Alongside the proposed corporate registry, the cabinet has floated the idea of extending anti-money laundering laws to “the area of the legal profession.”

The council said it had initiated the reforms after concluding there was “room for improvement”  in identifying owners to strengthen the prevention and prosecution of financial crime.

The registry proposal, which follows similar reforms in the United States, the European Union and elsewhere, comes one year after ICIJ’s Pandora Papers exposed the especially active role of Swiss wealth advisors in helping suspected financial criminals hide wealth. The global investigation, led by ICIJ in partnership with more than 150 media partners, was based on a trove of millions of leaked documents that included information on more than 90 Swiss advisers – legal, notary and consulting firms – whose role in the offshore system is often obscured by a cloak of secrecy that enables them to operate with little accountability.

Read full report: https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/switzerland-aims-to-track-corporate-ownership-in-attempt-to-curb-money-laundering/