Nearly eight years after the UK’s offshore financial centres committed to greater beneficial ownership transparency, the picture is still deeply uneven. The UK continues to say it expects all Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to move to public registers of beneficial ownership, yet in practice many jurisdictions are still relying on narrower “legitimate interest” access models instead. Parliament’s latest briefing, published in March 2026, confirms that only a handful of Overseas Territories have fully public access registers in place, while others remain at consultation stage or are planning more limited access regimes.
That matters because beneficial ownership transparency is one of the clearest tests of whether the UK is serious about tackling illicit finance. Public registers are designed to show who really owns or controls a company or asset. They are a practical tool for tracing corruption, money laundering, sanctions evasion and tax abuse, especially where legal ownership is deliberately separated from real control. The UK has had its own public register since 2016, and the government’s 2025 Anti-Corruption Strategy says it still wants public registers in the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to become the norm.
Some progress, but only in some places
There has been movement, but it is patchy. According to the House of Commons Library, public registers are already in place in Gibraltar since 2020, Montserrat since 2024, and St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha since 2025. The Falkland Islands are expected to introduce a public register in 2026. By contrast, the Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos introduced only legitimate-interest access in 2025, while Anguilla, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands are expected to follow with similar models in 2026. In the Crown Dependencies, Jersey and Guernsey are consulting on legitimate-interest access rather than full public access.
Transparency International UK’s latest analysis suggests a clear pattern. Smaller jurisdictions with less reliance on trust and company service industries have been more willing to introduce public registers. Gibraltar, St Helena and Montserrat are cited as examples of places showing that transparency and privacy can be balanced. Meanwhile, larger offshore centres with greater commercial dependence on secrecy-based financial services, including the British Virgin Islands, Cayman and Bermuda, have generally chosen more restrictive systems.
Why “legitimate interest” is not solving the problem
The problem is not simply that legitimate-interest access is narrower than full public access. It is that in practice these systems appear too slow, too expensive and too restrictive to work as effective anti-corruption tools.
Transparency International UK found that live and proposed regimes often require case-by-case applications, offer no meaningful ability to conduct open-ended searches, impose high evidentiary thresholds and can take months to process. In some cases, applicants may even trigger a notification to the beneficial owner, creating obvious tipping-off risks. The organisation also found that the data provided could be incomplete, outdated or of limited investigative value. Its conclusion is blunt: legitimate-interest models are proving clunky, slow and ineffective for holding wrongdoers to account.
That gap between theory and practice is especially important because the UK government has explicitly said what it expects from these interim systems. The 2025 Anti-Corruption Strategy says legitimate-interest access should be broad, inclusive and straightforward, open to journalists, civil society and academics, available quickly and either free or at reasonable cost. Yet the same strategy also reiterates that this should be an interim step, not the destination. The UK’s “ultimate expectation” remains publicly accessible registers.
The political risk for the UK
This creates a credibility problem for the UK ahead of its Countering Illicit Finance Summit in London on 23 and 24 June 2026. The government is presenting the summit as part of a broader push to show international leadership against dirty money. Its Anti-Corruption Strategy also promises clearer expectations for Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies on beneficial ownership transparency. But if major British-linked financial centres still operate systems that frustrate rather than enable scrutiny, the UK’s claim to lead on transparency will be difficult to sustain.
This is not a technical issue. It goes to the heart of how illicit finance moves. Transparency International’s research suggests companies registered in the Overseas Territories have diverted £250 billion from 79 countries, with 92% of those entities registered in the British Virgin Islands. Separate Transparency International research highlighted how Russian-linked trade has continued to pass through British island territories since the invasion of Ukraine, raising wider questions about secrecy, sanctions exposure and enforcement.
What this means for firms
For regulated firms, the lesson is straightforward. Jurisdictional risk cannot be assessed by looking only at whether a register technically exists. The more important question is whether ownership information is genuinely accessible, timely and useful. A jurisdiction that offers only narrow, high-friction access to ownership data may still present elevated corruption, money laundering and sanctions risk, even where it claims to meet international standards.
That matters for onboarding, third-party due diligence, transaction monitoring and investigations. If ownership data cannot be independently checked without excessive delay, evidential hurdles or cost, firms may need to compensate through stronger source-of-wealth checks, enhanced due diligence, more sceptical treatment of nominee structures and closer scrutiny of corporate vehicles tied to offshore financial centres.
The real test is still to come
Eight years on from the original commitment, the UK can point to some real progress. Gibraltar, Montserrat and St Helena show that public registers are possible. But the wider picture remains one of delay, dilution and uneven political will. Parliament says the UK still expects public registers across the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. The government’s own strategy says legitimate-interest access is only an interim step. Transparency campaigners are warning that the systems being built in several key jurisdictions do not provide meaningful accountability.
So the question ahead of the June summit is no longer whether beneficial ownership transparency matters, but whether the UK is willing to insist on it when the jurisdictions involved sit within Britain’s own financial orbit. Until that is answered more convincingly, claims of global leadership on illicit finance will continue to look incomplete.
