The United Kingdom government warned it could legislate to compel its Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories to adopt public registers of beneficial ownership if voluntary efforts continue to stall, the prime minister’s anti-corruption champion said Monday, according to the Financial Times.

Baroness Margaret Hodge and Justice Minister Jake Richards traveled to Guernsey on Monday as part of a renewed push to press the dependencies and territories to do more to combat illicit finance, the FT reported. The initiative covers the three crown dependencies—Guernsey, Jersey, and the Isle of Man—as well as Britain’s 14 overseas territories, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, and Bermuda.

“I think we’re coming to the end of the road trying to do this through agreement,” Hodge told the FT, adding that the British government “could consider revisiting the advantages” the dependencies and territories enjoy by virtue of their relationship with the UK as potential leverage. Those benefits include UK citizenship rights, defense arrangements, and use of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as a final court of appeal.

Richards said the dependencies and territories had “too often been used to facilitate aggressive tax avoidance, hide illicit gains, and wash the proceeds of crime,” and that progress toward greater transparency had been “painfully slow,” the FT reported.

All 14 UK overseas territories have pledged to introduce beneficial ownership registers, but implementation has been uneven, according to the news outlet. Only Gibraltar, Montserrat, and St. Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha have introduced fully public registers to date. The Falkland Islands is expected to follow later this year. 

The Cayman Islands, BVI, and Turks and Caicos Islands have established restricted “legitimate access” registers open to law enforcement, tax authorities, and others with a qualifying interest, the newspaper said. 

Jersey and Guernsey are still consulting on legitimate access models, according to the report. All three crown dependencies have committed to expanding access to parties with a legitimate interest, though Hodge warned that some jurisdictions claiming to have implemented such registers were not meeting adequate access standards in practice.

Mike Lewis, director of the British investigative think-tank TaxWatch, told the FT that exorbitant fees, bureaucratic hurdles, and restrictive qualifying conditions were effectively blocking access in some cases. “It’s good to see tough talk but we need to see tough action. It’s already over a decade late,” he said in the report. 

Some dependencies and territories have cited a 2022 European Court of Justice ruling, which found that public beneficial ownership registers aimed solely at combating money laundering unduly infringed on privacy rights, as justification for limiting access, the newspaper said.