When the French Parliament attempted to force the French
Register of Trusts onto the shoulders of their Finance Ministry,
there was a deal of" grommellement", or grumblings from Bercy on
exactly how that was to work. They already run the Land
Register!
In answer to a Parliamentary question, the Exchequer
Secretary to the United Kingdom Treasury, David Gauke cautioned
against readily supporting EU parliamentary proposals seeking to
create public registers for trusts.
11th March 2014 column 176
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD): I am sure that
Members of this House will welcome the overwhelming support in the
European Parliament this morning in voting in favour of open public
registers of company beneficial ownership and voting against
exempting trusts from public disclosure. Will the Minister apply
pressure to his colleagues to ensure that the Council adopts the
same rigorous position as Members of the European Parliament?
Mr Gauke: We will look at that proposal. There is a
need to ensure that systems that apply across the European Union
have a proper understanding of how trusts work in the UK and some
of the challenges that exist. Trusts are not companies, and there
are more difficulties in dealing with them than there are in
dealing with a public register for companies.
There is nothing less certain than that. The Liberal Democrat
statement misconstrues the extent of the Law of Property Act 1925,
and the Trusts of Land an Appointment of Trustees Act 1996 to which
David Gauke responded.
It is telling that the Members of our own House of Commons are
taking up arms against what is a fundamental element of our Law of
Property, for the sake of appearing to be on the same team as their
European "colleagues".
Whilst David Lloyd George managed to open the doors to
capitalism and home ownership by a tax law forcing land out of
estates onto the market, I am not sure that the Liberal Democrats
are aware that in bowing under the yoke of their colleagues'
extension of the money laundering directive, they are acheiving
anything positive other than a further unecessary layer of
compliance expense for the average owner of an English property
resident in the EU, or elsewhere. There is a right to
privacy.
At long last someone in the Treasury has grasped the economic
implications of a trust as a property institution, rather than a
company, and the need to call a halt to those seeking to define it
as something else for their own purposes.
The NGO lobbyists influencing these Parliamentarians have not
been entirely frank with their reasoning and methodology. Tax
evasion and money laundering are no more than populist pretexts to
render every European citizen's property open to public, ie NGO,
scrutiny throughout the Union.
Enforcement agencies already have access to this information
through existing mechanisms, and it is not by rendering this
information available to public scrutiny that anything will be
acheived.
The French for example have not yet volunteered to render their
co-propriétés or indivisions over their property in France public
knowledge, why should the English go first?