Follow The Money, Also Into Tax Havens

This week, British MPs moved to force Britain's Overseas Territories, which are known as tax havens, to abolish corporate secrecy by the end of the decade.

This article on The Guardian's website zooms in on Open Ownership, a small non-profit created in 2016 by seven anti-corruption organisations. It is working towards building a vast, open, global register of who owns what.

"The more data we can link, the fewer places there are left for money launderers to hide," said Zosia Sztykowski, Open Ownership's project lead.

Kleptocracy is enabled by anonymous companies, which strip the fingerprints off stolen money and, having done so, hide it under the cover of supposedly respectable corporations, writes journalist Oliver Bullough.

For openness to become truly useful, Sztykowski says, data needs to be pooled so that investigators — police, journalists, anti-fraud teams — can follow the money across borders.

If an individual has hidden his ownership of an asset behind a chain of companies, each registered in a different country, then officers require cooperation from counterparts all over the world just to discover who owns something. Often this takes so long that the criminal has escaped before the task can be completed; other times, the information can't be obtained at all.

"Last week it looked like a dream. This week, it begins to look possible," the author concludes.