Premier Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley has fired back after an influential British politician accused the Virgin Islands of making a “mockery” of combatting financial crime by launching a cartoon bird logo intended to highlight the issue before enacting key new laws.
The attack came from Joe Powell, a member of the ruling Labour Party who heads a cross-party watchdog group in the House of Commons examining financial crime and tax matters.
Mr. Powell condemned the VI, Bermuda, Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands for delaying plans to bring in expanded registers of company ownership.
The jurisdictions, he noted, failed to fulfill a November agreement at the Joint Ministerial Council — an annual gathering of OT leaders and British ministers in London — to pass beneficial-ownership legislation by April and enact it by June.
Though the VI has not passed such legislation yet, the government has held public consultations on the issue and Mr. Wheatley has said repeatedly that a new register will be launched by the end of June.
Nevertheless, Mr. Powell directed his most scathing comments at the VI.
“The British Virgin Islands have not only missed a key deadline they committed to at the Joint Ministerial Council, but are now making a mockery of UK values by unveiling a cartoon mascot instead of taking real action against economic crime,” he told the UK Guardian newspaper.
He was referring to the January launch of a cartoon mascot named “Riley Right,” which government said was designed to focus attention on the battle against financial crime and promote corporate responsibility.
Mr. Powell saw the mascot differently.
He accused the government of “trivialising” the fight against financial crime by releasing the image of a green parakeet wearing a suit at a time when legislation on beneficial ownership had not been passed by the House of Assembly.
“If the BVI wishes to do business under the British flag and our rule of law, they must also uphold the standards of transparency and integrity we expect,” he said. “This trivialisation of serious global financial threats undermines our fight against money laundering and kleptocracy — and it ultimately makes Britain less safe.”
The Labour MP called on the UK government to carefully consider its next steps to deal with the issue.
“It is deeply disappointing that the BVI and other overseas territories continue to delay the implementation of vital transparency measures,” he said. “The UK must now look seriously at how to ensure these longstanding commitments are delivered.”
Mascot defended
The premier, however, hit back at the criticism.
“The government of the Virgin Islands strongly refutes the misleading portrayal of the territory in recent international press reports which depict it as undermining or trivialising the global fight against illicit finance through its Riley Right public aware ness campaign,” he said yesterday. “Combating financial crime has been central to several years of reforms that the Virgin Islands has undertaken and continues to implement.”
The premier insisted the cartoon character is a tool for raising awareness about the need to combat money crime.
“We have undertaken a range of local initiatives, which include our new campaign featuring Riley Right, to educate the VI community on key issues such as money laundering and how to safeguard against it in a simplified and engaging way,” he said.
The premier added that the VI has consulted comprehensively on the beneficial ownership issue since the JMC.
“That consultation was deliberately extended to ensure meaningful engagement, and we are now in the final stages of policy development,” he explained. “The resulting framework will be submitted to the UK government imminently and made public shortly thereafter.”
Tensions over the beneficial ownership issue have been simmering since last summer, when the premier told the HOA that access to the territory’s expanded register will be restricted to people with a “legitimate interest” — and not made fully public as requested by transparency advocates.
‘Dirty cash’
This week, Phil Brickell, another Labour member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group that Mr. Powell chairs, was even more incendiary in his language about the VI.
“While I welcome efforts to promote doing business the right way anywhere, surely time and money would be better spent lifting the veil of corporate secrecy in the British Virgin Islands, which has been used by the world’s crooks and kleptocrats to clean and stash their dirty cash,” he said.
The two politicians join a longstanding chorus of attack in the UK Parliament against what they consider lack of financial transparency in the VI.