Chief Minister Allan Bell MHK joined political leaders from around the world today (Thursday May 12, 2016) at the anti-corruption summit hosted by the UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

In comments to the session “Exposing Corruption”, Mr Bell congratulated David Cameron for his leadership and expressed his expectation that all nations, including the largest economies, would support the summit’s drive towards achieving greater international cooperation and adopting global standards in the fight against corruption.

In April this year the Isle of Man became the first British Crown Dependency to commit to an initiative on automatic exchange of company beneficial ownership information; a move spearheaded the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, France and Spain. Today’s summit noted 40 countries have now joined the initiative.

The Chief Minister explained: “If we are ever to defeat corruption, every nation needs to sign up. We need action, not fine words.”

“It is a step in the right direction that the summit is calling on others to implement measures, such as the Common Reporting Standard on automatic exchange of tax information, which the Isle of Man has already adopted. In our commitment to be at forefront of the drive against corruption and money laundering, we are showing that international business centres like the Isle of Man are part of the solution to such global challenges, not part of the problem.”

In drawing the summit to a close, Prime Minister Cameron praised the British Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories saying, “All of them have committed to having registers of beneficial ownership and crucially most of them now have committed to the automatic exchange of information and automatically sharing those registers of beneficial ownership with other countries. That puts them ahead of many developed countries and even states inside the United States of America in terms of what they are prepared to do.

“They’ve been an easy target for the press, campaigners and other countries in the past. I think that is quite difficult to do that now because they raised their game to the extent that OECD has said they have shown exemplary leadership.”

Chief Minister Bell concluded: “As a hub for international business and finance we want to see effective measures in place to protect the health of the global economy against the contagion of corruption and other financial crime.

“And we are determined to protect the reputation and integrity of our own economy by making sure that the Isle of Man is not a place where criminals can find a welcome.”