Summary of the report:

The Global Forum rated the Marshall Islands overall Largely Compliant with the international standard of transparency and exchange of information on requests. Since its 2016 report, the Marshall Islands have made good progress in addressing a number of serious  deficiencies identified, most importantly with the cancellation of bearer shares, which nonetheless remains to be finalised. Marshall Islands have provided the registered agent with supervisory functions in order to ensure the availability of ownership and accounting information. These functions are new and audits have started in 2019. Marshall Islands have also strengthened the corporate legal framework on the availability of beneficial ownership information, however the definition of beneficial owner is not fully aligned with the standard and there is no requirements to verify that the disclosed beneficial ownership information is accurate. Practical implementation of all these new obligations require further monitoring to ensure the standard is fully met in practice. Marshall Islands’ effectiveness in answering requests could not be assessed in practice since only one request was received during the period from 1 April 2015 2015 to 31 March 2018.

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