Russian War Triggers Plea to Register Oligarchs’ Global Wealth
By Isabel Gottlieb
(Bloomberg Law) -- World leaders should collaborate on a global asset registry that can tackle offshore wealth and tax secrecy, a group of professors, economists, and advocates said in a Tuesday open letter.
The Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation, or ICRICT, called on Group of 20 leaders to “convene an urgent international summit to address offshore wealth, the toxic role of tax and secrecy havens, and develop and deploy a fast plan to implement a Global Asset Registry.”
The group’s proposed registry would be a database, shared among governments—and possibly the general public—that would link “all types of assets, companies, and other legal vehicles used to own assets” to their beneficial, or ultimate, owners, ICRICT said in a report on the proposal.
There are already national registries for assets like real estate and land, said Gabriel Zucman, an associate professor of economics at University of California, Berkeley, said during a virtual news conference. A global financial asset registry would more clearly identify the beneficial owners of assets, and extend the registries to cover financial assets, Zucman said. It would also include assets like yachts, art, and
cryptocurrency, the ICRICT report said.
In their statement the group said a registry would connect “all national asset registries of all the different forms of wealth that an individual can own where they already exist while encouraging all countries that have not yet created comprehensive asset registries to do so, ”The idea could have legs now, as governments try to target the wealth of Russian oligarchs and realize “that this lack of knowledge is a limitation,” said Jayati Ghosh, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. speaking at the news conference.
“The global situation now is a little bit different in terms of slightly more willingness to accept the possibility and the need for this kind of knowledge,” she said. “I think we’ll get there,” Zucman said, noting strong
public demand for a registry. “The information exists. There is a legitimate public interest for the collection and publication of this information,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Isabel Gottlieb in Washington at igottlieb@bloombergtax.com
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Meg Shreve at mshreve@bloombergindustry.com; Alex Clearfield at aclearfield@bloombergindustry.com