While Canada holds meetings and talks about it, the EU has officially ended corporate secrecy. The anonymous and numbered companies that facilitate tax evasion and money laundering in Europe will soon have their ownership published in public, online registries for all to see.

The EU declared Friday that member states will have to put the names of those who own companies registered in their countries into a public, searchable, online database — and they have 18 months to do it. ( DMITRY KOSTYUKOV / The New York Times file photo )

Eighteen months after the U.K. established the world’s first public “beneficial ownership” registry, the EU declared on Friday that it will follow suit, citing the Panama Papers leak as having prompted the move. “The EU has made a major breakthrough tonight in the fight against money laundering by getting the beneficial owners of companies out of the shadows,” said Laure Brillaud, the anti-money laundering policy officer at Transparency International EU. EU member states will have to put the names of those who own companies registered in their countries into a public, searchable, online database — and they have 18 months to do it.

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“The new European public registers of company beneficial ownership will set the new global benchmark against which to assess every other country around the world,” Brillaud said. Read more: Canada’s 102 biggest corporations avoid billions in taxes each year, paying far less than the official rate Contacted for comment, the federal finance ministry said it “takes note” of the EU registry. “We will monitor the EU agreement closely as it will inform the ongoing work of the federal, provincial and territorial working group on beneficial ownership,” wrote spokesperson Chloé Luciani-Girouard. “What the EU is doing is a very significant step. This practice has to come to North America,” said Richard Leblanc, a professor of corporate governance at York and Harvard universities. “One should not be able to hide behind a web of numbered companies without disclosing true ownership.”

In last spring’s federal budget, Canada announced that it would put in place a “national strategy to strengthen the transparency” of corporate ownership. After meeting last weekend, federal and provincial finance ministers committed to requiring companies to collect and keep corporate ownership information on hand, but did not say they would establish an ownership registry, let alone make it public.

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“That’s a first step, but it’s wholly inadequate so far as transparency is concerned,” Leblanc said. “What good is compelling disclosure if you can’t access it?” In Canada, secrecy around corporate ownership makes it possible to register a corporation, open a bank account, and send and receive money overseas all without disclosing one’s name — the same kind of secrecy offered by traditional tax havens. A Star/CBC investigation earlier this year showed how this has led some foreigners to use Canada to “snow wash” money that has either been obtained illicitly, or not declared to tax authorities. Earlier this month, the EU also released a blacklist of non-cooperative tax havens, including Barbados, one of the most popular tax havens used by Canadian companies. This diplomatic effort to exert pressure on tax havens to disclose the owners of offshore companies is an international component of the domestic ownership registry, Leblanc said. “Canada will be increasingly anomalous if it doesn’t follow suit,” he said. “We want it to be a race to the top. Canada prides itself on transparency and good governance. We’re slipping behind. We need to catch up.”