Thank you for the question.
The absence of public registries listing ultimate beneficiaries or real owners does hinder our investigations, of course. However, I believe the provincial ministers of Finance have agreed on the development of a framework likely to lead to solutions. This may take the form of a national registry to be created in July 2019. I think that the Canada Revenue Agency would view such a public registry favourably. For the time being, we are working with existing legislation.
I will now talk about the 78 convictions you just mentioned. The CRA Criminal Investigations Program is conducting 42 ongoing investigations involving foreign transactions. Changes to the program can take a certain time, naturally, but we are conducting 42 offshore investigations. The searches which occurred in the past two weeks show that we are headed in the right direction. I also want to mention that we are also conducting 23 tax investigations into the laundering of the products of crime.
Our objectives are really aligned with the goals of the program's initial transformation.