Our co-CEO Blair Glencorse was invited by the UK Government to contribute to the Wilton Park discussions, helping to shape the agenda for the upcoming Foreign Secretary’s Countering Illicit Finance Summit. Over two days, he worked alongside leading experts in anti-corruption and finance, as well as key UK decision-makers, to address one of the most pervasive threats to the global political system.

The challenge is immense. Despite decades of anti-money laundering reforms, less than 1% of criminal proceeds laundered through the financial system are seized. The human impact is devastating, with illicit financial flows draining over $90 billion annually from Sub-Saharan Africa, undermining governance and fueling instability.

The UK finds itself at a crossroads: it is both a high-risk jurisdiction and a potential global leader in the fight. As a premier financial center, it has a responsibility and the expertise to drive change.

The discussions yielded several key pathways for action:

• The UK should lead the world on closing Beneficial Ownership and trust loopholes by requiring disclosure of beneficial owners of trusts and nominee arrangements, linking Register of Overseas Entities (ROE) data with the HM Land Registry, and promoting adoption of the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) to enable cross-registry search, analytics, and secure sharing.

• Expanding international asset recovery alliances under the International Anti Corruption Coordination Center (one of the successes of the UK’s 2015 Anti-Corruption Summit), include asset-sharing agreements, and develop transparent restitution mechanisms with civil society oversight.

• On real estate transparency, the UK could launch a Coalition of Property Cities (London, New York, Paris, Dubai) to exchange data schemas, red-flag typologies, and enforcement practices; and support OECD real-estate transparency pilots for cross-border data exchanges.

Many of these issues are not specific to illicit financial flows, and are ones that affect us more generally when it comes to solving global challenges such as lack of cross-border cooperation; lack of “political will”; narratives that do not effectively bring in citizens and make these issues relevant to them; and closing spaces that prevent civil society engaging effectively. These topics can be very technical but at their heart they are about finding ways to work together to translate policy into practice that can improve lives.

Accountability Lab