President Muhammadu Buhari with
British Prime Minister David Cameron after the opening of the
Anti-Corruption Summit in London .
Yesterday’s anti-corruption summit in London agreed to a plan to speed up international efforts on asset recovery.
The Global Forum for Asset Recovery will
bring together governments and law enforcement agencies to discuss
returning assets to Nigeria, Ukraine, Sri Lanka and Tunisia.
The meeting will be held in the United
States (US) next year, co-hosted with the United Kingdom (UK), and
supported by the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank, the BBC
reported.
British Prime Minister David Cameron
hosted the summit hailed as the first of its kind, bringing together
governments, business and civil society.
The controversy over Cameron’s
description of Nigeria and Afghanistan as “fantastically corrupt”,
almost overshadowed the summit but did not prevent the presidents of the
two countries from attending.
President Muhammadu Buhari made no
reference to the comments although at a pre summit session, he said he
does not need an apology from Cameron but a return of Nigeria’s stolen
asset locked in British banks.
Buhari said the international community
must come up with ways of getting rid of safe havens and ensuring a
better return of assets.
“When it comes to tackling corruption the international community has looked the other way for far too long,” he said.
There has been concern recently that the
UK, particularly London, had become a place where rich foreigners could
buy properties but hide their ownership.
Mr Cameron said that should stop and foreign firms that own property in the UK must declare their assets in a public register.
Downing Street said Mr Cameron’s plans
for a register of foreign companies owning UK property would include
those who already owned property in the UK as well as those seeking to
buy.
It said the register would mean “corrupt
individuals and countries will no longer be able to move, launder and
hide illicit funds through London’s property market, and will not
benefit from our public funds”.
It said foreign companies owned about 100,000 properties in England and Wales and that more than 44,000 of these were in London.
Five other countries including France,
the Netherlands, Nigeria and Afghanistan have also pledged to launch
public registers of true company ownership. Australia, New Zealand,
Jordan, Indonesia, Ireland and Georgia announced initial steps towards
similar arrangements.
World leaders and politicians, including
the president of Colombia attended the summit, as well as organisations
such as the World Bank, OECD and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
But critics say the UK’s overseas territories and Crown dependencies also need to be more transparent.
Tax havens with UK links, including
Bermuda and the Cayman Islands were represented, but the British Virgin
Islands was not at the summit. Neither was FIFA, football’s governing
body, which is at the centre of a large bribery scandal.
The British Virgin Islands has not yet
signed up to the automatic sharing of it register, but the Prime
Minister defended Britain’s overseas territories saying they had come a
long way.
Alan Bell, the chief minister of the
Isle of Man, which is a Crown dependency, said progress could not be
made unless the US did more and tackled its own tax havens such as the
state of Delaware.
Mr Kerry said this month President
Obama’s administration had announced a set of financial regulations
designed to force companies to disclose more information about their
owners.
There are also plans for a new
anti-corruption co-ordination centre in London and a wider corporate
offence for executives who fail to prevent fraud or money laundering
inside their companies.
Mr Cameron said they were looking for
greater transparency and were introducing a code of conduct for
professionals such as accountants, solicitors and estate agents who
enabled corruption, either knowingly or unknowingly.
He wanted to see how assets could be recovered, with legislation being introduced in 21 new countries.
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