The Norwegian Ministry of Finance has put forward a proposition to the Norwegian Parliament (Stortinget) concerning a new legislation for foreign nominees in the Norwegian market. The proposition gives authority so that nominee’s by certain regulations, may be obligated to report all underlying shareholders to the authorities or others, on a regular basis.
In the fall of 2005 the Norwegian FSA started a full investigation of all nominee licence holders in order to find out if they actually could supply the requested beneficiary information in a satisfying matter. This proposal will further strengthen the reporting requirements, and we believe this is a result of the 2005 investigations and the fact that some institutions did not report satisfactory information within the set timeline.
“SEB will continue to work with the Norwegian FSA and strive for further involvement in the administrative tasks of collecting beneficial owner information in the future so that incidents of non-reply due to incorrectly sent requests etc can be avoided going forward,” says a spokesman for SEB.