To fight or not to fight for your rights

The confrontation between UK and its Overseas Territories is one of the most controversial topics for now. This is due to the fact that each side of the conflict has its supporters and opponents.

Organizations and individuals, committed to transparency and fighting poverty, call on the UK government to clamp down on tax havens. They believe that greater transparency would help these countries claim their fair share of revenue, money that can then be used to fund public services. And this is an important argument, since to this day poverty is a major reason why a lot of people have limited to no access to medical care and education.

The approach to solving this issue should be extremely flexible. Removing financial secrecy through public registers can heavily affect the economy of the Overseas Territories and generally affect the standard of living of their residents.

Having analyzed the situation, the public converges on the following options for the Overseas Territories: (I) Implement public registers and comply with the new global transparency standard; (II) Reject the implementation of the public registers of the actual owners of companies; (III) become independent from UK.

The economy of such countries strongly depends on the offshore companies incorporated on their territories, since they are considered as tax heaven and have favorable conditions for registration.