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
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
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).
This is the first in an occasional series of resources for background reading on corporate transparency space (see also Impact of Open Company Data), to help new OpenCorporates staff and the wider open data community get up to speed. These are also works-in-progress, and a call for contributions; tell us what we’ve missed and what else … Continue reading Reading list: Beneficial Ownership Transparency
There has been compelling evidence that UK's property market is being used as a harbour for dirty money. Here are some of the reports which have investigated this issue: Mystery on Baker Street by Global Witness Faulty Towers by Transparency International UK London Property: A top destination for money launderers by Transparency International UK and Thomson … Continue reading Consultation response: UK Overseas Entity Property Register
Written by Chris Taggart and Hera Hussain When the announcement of a public beneficial ownership register in Germany was made in November 2016, it was welcomed by the transparency community and investigative journalists. True, it wasn’t going to be free, still less open data, but it was a significant step for a country that has … Continue reading Germany: Do not let ‘personal security’ be the bait and switch for public accountability
Grand corruption is a networked problem; to fight it we need a networked solution, and nowhere is this more true than who controls and benefits from companies. The Global Beneficial Ownership Register will tackle this, by collecting and linking together beneficial ownership datasets and self-disclosed corporate data. By doing this, it will enable investigators and … Continue reading Going to IODC? Help us design the Global Beneficial Ownership Register
As we announced earlier this month, OpenCorporates is now pulling in Beneficial Ownership data from the UK's new PSC (Persons of Significant Control) register. This blog post is a somewhat wonkish explanation of how do we model that information (in layman's terms, how we understand the information and store as data), and in particular, how do that … Continue reading Modelling the UK Beneficial Ownership data
On Friday UK Companies House published the first data from its new 'Persons of Significant Control' (PSC) register (colloquially known as Beneficial Ownership). This is a pretty big deal, for a number of reasons: It's the world's first public national beneficial ownership register It's the first structured beneficial ownership data to be releases publicly It's being … Continue reading UK Beneficial Ownership information now in OpenCorporates
This morning, at the London Anti-Corruption Summit, it was announced that France, the Netherlands, Nigeria and Afghanistan would create public beneficial ownership registers, and that Australia, New Zealand, Jordan, Indonesia, Ireland and Georgia will "agree to take the initial steps towards making similar arrangements". Of course the devil is in the details, but let's take this announcement … Continue reading Public Beneficial Ownership: We need open, not just public data
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