Today is International Anti-Corruption Day and, this year, it gets extra juice because it coincides with President Biden’s Summit for Democracy, where free societies are coming together to oppose authoritarianism, corruption and human rights abuses. And given America’s extremely welcome set of announcements in the last few days about improving access to Beneficial Ownership information, where the true owners and controllers of companies and – in future I hope – real estate, trusts and foundations are all revealed so police, journalists and citizens can ‘follow the money’ to see whether and when dirty loot is being stashed in respectable jurisdictions like UK or USA, the last few weeks have felt pretty promising for the fight against organised criminals, kleptocrats and oligarchs.
The UK and USA have a special responsibility because we host the two biggest financial centres on the planet, but we’ve got plenty of friends and supporters alongside us in the fight as scores of other countries have already joined the Beneficial Ownership Transparency campaign. On Tuesday I took part in an international event where leading countries shared their experiences of how to implement publicly accessible ownership registers and, if we’ve got to this stage, then it feels like genuinely practical progress.
International standards help as well. We are pushing for the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to strengthen its standard on Beneficial Ownership Transparency, and I’m absolutely delighted to see it now features in the 2021 OECD Anti-Bribery Recommendation (published today), so it will bite whenever countries who have signed the Convention have their progress assessed and evaluated from now on. The Recommendation has some other important improvements, like better protections for whistleblowers, which shouldn’t be forgotten either and, last but certainly not least, next week’s UN Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) meetings offer another chance to build international support and momentum for beneficial ownership and other measures to clamp down on corruption.
But international agreements and summitry only work if they’re backed up by concrete actions when all the delegates go home (or, these days, turn off their zoom links instead). The Anti-Corruption Strategy Year 3 update will report pretty good progress (thanks for asking) when it finally emerges so we will be able to hold our heads up high. The Government’s promised (and very promising) reforms to public buying and procurement are getting closer, and look as though they will be much faster, nimbler, more transparent and fraud-proof than their EU-derived predecessors. And the chorus of support for a long-needed new law to upgrade and improve the UKs own ownership registers is getting ever-louder too.
The biggest cloud on the horizon is the recent controversy about standards in public life. We’ve had Nigel Boardman’s latest report on the Ministerial Code and the Greensill affair, as well as ‘Standards Matter 2’ from the Committee on Standards in Public Life and, most recently, some fresh proposals from the cross-party House of Commons Standards Committee on the behaviour of MPs in the wake of the Owen Paterson affair. Obviously any decisions about House of Commons Standards and MP behaviour ought to be a cross-party decision, so while the Government must make an important contribution it won’t be the final arbiter. But on many other areas, from whether former Ministers and senior Whitehall mandarins are allowed to take jobs with organisations they were previously regulating, to how transparently meetings with Ministers, Political Advisors and Civil Servants are reported, the Government must lead. I have been feeding my views in publicly and privately on all these issues (you can see a copy of my proposals to the Committee on Standards in Public Life here for example) but, broadly, I hope that when the Government responds to these reports it will lean in to reforms and improvements, so our rules are as up to date as possible.