New jurisdictions are coming thick and fast – the 114th has just been added to OpenCorporates. This is the company register of the British Crown dependency of Guernsey, a small island located in the English Channel, popular as an offshore finance centre for private equity funds.
We’re adding the following company data attributes, sourced from Guernsey Registry which holds information on 65,000 companies:
- Company Number
- Company Name
- Company Status
- Company Type
- Incorporation Date
- Dissolution Date (where appropriate)
- Alternative / Trading Names
Address information:
- Registered Address
- Headquarters Address
Filings information:
- ID
- Title
- Filing Date
We’d normally use the company number exactly as published by the registry. In this instance, the numbers issued don’t uniquely identify a company across the whole jurisdiction. To work around this we are prefixing each original company number with the ID of the register that it belongs to (e.g. 1-xx for Guernsey Registered Companies, 2-xx for Limited Partnerships). More information can be found here.
This dataset does not make up the whole Bailiwick of Guernsey, the tiny islands of Alderney and Sark are also on our hit-list to add to OpenCorporates. To the best of our current knowledge, Alderney’s company register is not available online, you have fly over to inspect it in person – please let us know if you’ve found an easier way to get hold of the data! Alderney also issues a fair number of internet gambling licences, and we’ll see if we can add these to our growing licence dataset.
Company information originating from the offshore secrecy jurisdiction of Sark is even more opaque, it’s been the source of accusations of money laundering and tax avoidance, and was known for its discreet nominee directors called “Sark Larks“.
Image credit: “St Peter Port High Street”, courtesy of VisitGuernsey.com, © States of Guernsey
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