Prime Minister Assures There will be Policy for Transparency in Online Companies Registry Management
Prime Minister John Briceño
The companies registry has gone digital and you’ll get to hear all about the ease of access that the medium provides for registered business owners who want to access their business profiles from wherever they are. The online service also comes about as a result of the merging of local and international companies’ registries. But part of that online service now provides a new layer of protection for companies or confidentiality on its particulars. So, for example, when the media wants to research online how a company entered into a contract with the government to do a particular project, it would have to go through an agent that is hired by the company they are doing the research on. Today, that question was posed to Prime Minister John Briceño and he explained that the confidentiality that is provided for businesses did not come out of any menacing intent.
Prime Minister John Briceño
“There was no sinister plan to try to hide things from anybody as some members of the media and the public have been suggesting. It was simply that we have been forced to do what we are doing right now. The O.E.C.D or the countries of the European Union are trying to tighten up on the I.B.Cs (International Business Companies) and they are telling us that if we don’t want to be blacklisted then we have to find a way how we can combine both registries; that you cannot have one that pays a certain tax rate and then the other one that pays a different tax rate. So we figured that the best way is to amalgamate both registries as one. I don’t deal with I.B.Cs; I don’t own an I.B.C so we never thought or felt it was an issue when it comes to the issue of the registered agents – that if a person is setting up his company, he or she can decided whether they want to have a registered agent or not. When it comes to government finances we are making sure that there’s going to be openness and transparency and we’re going to start with policy tomorrow when we presented it to Cabinet and I’ve already spoken to a number of ministers and all of them agree with it and secondly to change the law so that that cannot happen.”
