The Bell Tower of Saint Sophia Cathedral, Kyiv, taken on my visit to the city in August 2017, on a trip to help with the creation of a Beneficial Ownership Register for Ukrainian Companies The world has watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine in horror over the past few weeks. In this blog post, OpenCorporates’ … Continue reading This must be the wakeup call for true corporate transparency
8 years ago, OpenCorporates surveyed access to official company register data in the EU. To our knowledge, this was the first time that this had been done in a systematic way. The results were not good. Data and access were routinely restricted on a pay-to-play basis. If you had the money, you could access it … Continue reading Is this a fork in the road for EU company data?
We are entering a world where there will be an explosion in the number, speed and complexity of companies, brought about by companies being incorporated by computer programs. Like the advent of high-frequency trading, this will bring a phenomenon of what we call ‘firefly companies’ – firms that exist for mere hours, minutes, even seconds, … Continue reading OECD Anti-Corruption & Integrity Forum: Can AML survive in a fireflies world?
The US is the most important and vibrant business market in the world. Yet fundamental information about the millions of companies powering its economy is very hard to access as data – making it difficult to understand: what companies exist, who are they connected to and what do they do? Our new report ‘US Company … Continue reading Unlocking US company data: Washington forges ahead where others lag behind
The EU’s Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive (5AMLD) came into force last week, on 10 January 2020. It was partly a response to the Panama Papers, a leak of thousands of documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca which revealed the extent to which the true beneficial owners of companies can be concealed behind a complex … Continue reading 5AMLD launches: close but no cigar
Last summer, OpenCorporates announced the creation of the OpenCorporates Trust, the entity that guarantees OpenCorporates’ public-benefit mission, and ensures we always operate to open up company data for the public good. One of our trustees is John Githongo, an anti-corruption journalist, activist and consultant. As an award-winning journalist, Mr Githongo investigated corruption in Kenya, writing … Continue reading Meet our trustees: John Githongo
Earlier this year, we reported on OpenCorporates' legal battle against the Quebec company register in the Montreal Superior Court – 2 years earlier we had applied to the court to rule that the register was wrong in its assertion that Act Respecting the Legal Publicity of Enterprises (ALPE) meant that we weren't allowed to hold … Continue reading OpenCorporates wins Quebec court battle
Great news: last week, the Council of Europe approved the "Directive on open data and the re-use of public sector information" (press release). This was the last opportunity for the directive to be rejected or changed, and it will go into force 20 days after the directive is published in the EU Official Journal (probably … Continue reading It’s official: EU Company Registers to go open data (subject to…)
Earlier this week, the UK Parliament's Joint Committee on the Draft Registration of Overseas Entities Bill published its recommendations on the bill, and we're pleased to say they've explicitly accepted a lot of our recommendations (as well as ones we made in common with anti-corruption NGOs such as Global Witness).
To coincide with our launch of OpenCorporates' new White Paper, The White Box Revolution – on how Black Box Data is being replaced with transparent, well-defined data with open IDs – our co-founder and CEO, Chris Taggart, last week presented a keynote at Strata EU, Europe's largest big data conference. Entitled the Irresistible Rise of … Continue reading Strata keynote: The irresistible rise of White Box Data
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