At the beginning of this year, the Hong Kong Government published a consultation paper on its legislative proposals to enhance the jurisdiction’s Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorist Financing (CTF) regulations.
The consultation recently finished and the government has released its conclusions, for which it intends to table legislation by July 2017:
- A licensing requirement will be imposed on trustees and corporate services providers, who will be required to conduct mandatory KYC / customer due diligence.
- Hong Kong companies will be required to maintain registers of their ultimate beneficial owners or persons with significant control. Access to these registers will be restricted to competent authorities only.