Overseas Chambers of Peter Harris

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David Gauke of the United Kingdom Treasury shares the French Finance Ministries' hesitations about installing a register of trusts.

March 13th 2014

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?