- Powers of Attorney (‘LPA’) allow someone to be appointed to make (i) financial or (ii) health and welfare decisions on behalf of another. The Office of the Public Guardian (‘OPG’), which oversees LPAs, plans to deliver a fully digital process for their creation and registration, which will remove the need for the paper forms. They ran a trial digital LPA tool which provided a partially digital process. The results of the OPG’s consultation highlighted a number of concerns, in particular, the lack of a signature. As such, these plans have been put on hold for now. In the meantime, an LPA plays an important part in an individual’s estate planning and we would recommend that everyone should consider whether they (or their parents) should have one.
- The European Parliament has recently agreed the terms of the fourth anti-money laundering directive, which includes measures to introduce a central public register of the beneficial owners of trusts. Despite initial concerns over the amount of information to be made available in the register, it appears that access to information on trusts will be restricted to EU national authorities. The agreement will be put to a full vote in the EU Parliament this year and we are monitoring this for further information on the details of the rules.
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