It's time to put an end to financial secrecy in the British Virgin Islands
3 min read
We cannot credibly aspire to be the anti-corruption capital of the world while the British Virgin Islands continues to avoid proper transparency.
Once again, the British Virgin Islands (BVI) have missed a critical deadline to implement a public company register, a vital transparency tool to help investigators follow the money and identify wrongdoing.
This isn’t a minor administrative oversight. It is a deliberate flouting of the will of Parliament, which in 2018 mandated that all British Overseas Territories – many of which are notorious tax havens – adopt public registers by the end of 2020.
After extensive lobbying, that deadline was extended to 2023. And then at a summit last year, the BVI managed to horse-trade another new deadline – this time, June 2025. And now, with June behind us, the BVI is once again dragging its feet.
This repeated rule-breaking undermines Britain’s national security, facilitates the flow of ill-gotten gains out of developing economies, and enables aggressive tax avoidance and evasion.
In an era of geopolitical volatility, the threat posed to our national security should not be underestimated. Secrecy in offshore havens compromises Britain’s ability to enforce sanctions and respond to hostile financial activity.
The BVI has long been one of the world’s most notorious secrecy jurisdictions. Investigations such as the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers revealed the BVI’s pivotal role in enabling money laundering and tax evasion. And only recently, it was reported that BVI-incorporated shell companies had enabled at least £500m of tax avoidance or evasion by Roman Abramovich.
The BVI government had, as recently as November, committed to providing the “maximum possible degree of access and transparency”. Yet, their proposal would allow officials to block access at will and, extraordinarily, notify company owners when they are being scrutinised, allowing bad actors to move funds before investigations can even begin.
This is a system designed not to expose wrongdoing, but to further shield it.
That the BVI continues to resist even the most basic transparency measures should come as no surprise: over half of its government revenue comes from trust and company service fees alone. But this only underscores the urgent need for reform. An economy that relies upon providing secrecy for crooks and oligarchs is not sustainable, and it is certainly not defensible.
Fear not, the government has tools at its disposal to tackle this problem once and for all. Parliament holds clear powers to make laws for the British Overseas Territories using 'Orders in Council — a tool it has used before.
In fact, a draft order already exists, setting out exactly how these public registers should work. This step has long been seen as a last resort. But after years of missed deadlines, stalling tactics, and broken promises, how much longer can we afford to wait?
Some critics argue that using an Order in Council would amount to an unacceptable power grab. But that argument must be weighed against the real victims of offshore secrecy: the citizens of developing economies. Every day, the BVI’s secrecy regime protects kleptocrats and tax-dodging elites who siphon off much-needed public resources from their fellow citizens.
Britain cannot credibly aspire to be the anti-corruption capital of the world while continuing to tolerate persistent obstruction from a small club of tax havens.
Parliament was clear back in 2018. The BVI then made a series of promises. All have been roundly ignored. It is time for Britain to act and put an end to decades of secrecy.
Sir Andrew Mitchell is Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield and Lloyd Hatton is Labour MP for South Dorset.
