The Government’s response to the consultation entitled ‘Transparency and trust: enhancing transparency of UK company ownership and increasing trust in UK business‘, launched in 2013, contains buried deep within it a proposal to abolish the right to have a corporate partner within a limited liability partnership (LLP).
Corporate partners are often used in LLPs to hold assets or for specific risk-minimisation or funding purposes and the proposals have been made on the basis that the use of a corporate partner can also reduce the ‘transparency’ of the equitable ownership of the LLP – which the Government sees as being used too often for tax evasion and money laundering.