THE effect was instant – but not lasting. Back in the summer of last year the UK Government said it would force every one of Scotland’s thousands of limited partnerships to name their true owners.

The structures – normally known by their abbreviation of SLP – had already been dubbed Britain’s home-grown secrecy vehicle by Transparency International.

Scottish law firms had been churning them out as vehicles for tax-efficient investments, both for equity funds and for Caribbean-based wealth management schemes.

But most SLPs were entirely opaque – and had little or nothing to do with legitimate solicitors. Many, indeed, were involved in some of the planet’s worst criminality.

They were popular precisely because they came with the kind of anonymity once offered by a numbered Swiss bank account. Then British ministers, who are responsible for Scots corporate law, said they wanted SLPs to name their “persons or significant control” or PSCs.

There were 116 SLPs registered in the June week when that announcement was made. There were just seven in the week when it began to come in to force, beginning on July 24. In the same week a year earlier, there had been 131 registrations. In the whole of August just 60 SLPs filed at Companies House. Then, slowly but surely, numbers started to recover.

There were 634 SLPs registered in the first six months of the PSC regime – 127 have given an address at a UK law firm, and 18 more appear to be one-off registrations by Scottish residents. This is the “legitimate” SLP business.

However, such firms were still outnumbered, more than three to one, by 489 new SLPs based at maildrops across Scotland

Tracing the real owners of such SLPs remains nearly impossible. That is because the named PSCs are either barely-identifiable individuals from the former Soviet Union or opaque corporate entities.

Some of those corporate entities acting as PSCs either have no PSC themselves or are not allowed to act as a PSC.

Nobody had ever thought this PSC regime would be a magic bullet to stop the abuse of SLPs. It has slowed down new registrations, especially in the late summer of last year.

But anyone who wants to avoid PSC transparency has probably worked out how to do so. There remain thousands of opaque SLPs created before last summer which remain non-compliant with the PSC system. Now it’s up to policy-makers to work out how to avoid a new boom of SLP abuse.