A UK tax blogger and tax justice campaigner believes those who are now driving the tax justice movement do not quite grasp exactly what it is that the United Kingdom should be asking of overseas territories.

His observation comes as a Bermuda delegation is at the Overseas Territories Joint Ministerial Council meetings in London, joining a dozen other OT representative teams. The JMC forum is the first OT summit with the UK’s new Labour Government.

It also comes after offshore critics, Labour’s Dame Margaret Hodge and the Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell, claimed this week in an op-ed for TheGuardian that overseas territories and crown dependencies were diluting or brushing aside efforts to stem money laundering and other illicit transactions.

The newspaper’s editorial stated: “We know all too well that the overseas territories and crown dependencies play a pivotal role in helping crooks and tax dodgers launder and hide their dirty money.

“Dirty money underpins corruption, crime and conflict. It causes immense harm at home and abroad, enabling serious and organised crime and diverting resources needed for vital public services.

“Public registers, and the scrutiny that they bring, are the best antidote to the scourge of illicit finance.”

The Guardian said the pair had support from dozens of MPs who were willing to bring pressure to bear during the summit between UK government officials and overseas territories this week.

In their crosshairs are the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands, together with crown dependencies Jersey and the Isle of Man.

The newspaper said a Cayman Islands spokesperson countered that there was ‘no evidence to back up any such claims with respect to illicit finance or sanctions evasion in the Cayman Islands’.

Money laundering cases, Cayman said, were rare and sanctions had been implemented effectively.

Jersey’s minister for external relations, was quoted: “Any suggestion that Jersey plays a pivotal role in helping criminals and tax evaders launder and hide illicit funds is wholly inaccurate.”

The Isle of Man government said it “remains committed to playing its part in deterring, preventing and detecting criminals and tax evaders who wish to launder or hide illicit funds”.

The Guardian also approached representatives of the BVIs and the Isle of Man for comment.

But Richard Murphy’s Funding the Future/Tax Research UK Blog notes how his own campaigning around tax haven issues ended, for reasons that included that vocal campaigners “never seemed to quite grasp exactly what it is that they should be asking for”.

Monday’s blog stated that issues such as automatic information exchange have already been delivered through the work of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In addition, country-by-country reporting is now a legal requirement for corporation tax reporting by multinational companies in more than 70 jurisdictions around the world.

And he said that tax justice campaigners don’t realise that knowing the beneficial owners of companies says little about what the company actually does.

He writes: “Knowing who owns a company tells you very little about it if you have no idea what it actually does, and this campaign never made any sense unless it was conducted in parallel with one that demanded that the accounts of all private limited companies be placed on public registers, wherever they might trade around the world.

“For reasons that completely baffle me, tax justice campaigners appear to have seen no connection between these two issues, largely because it seems that they know very little about financial data, or how to use it.”