Beneficial Ownership Data is Critical in the Fight Against Corruption

In the aftermath of a “disastrous” European court ruling, we explain why journalists — and the public — need access to corporate ownership registries.

In 2019, Luxembourg bowed to years of pressure to make its database of company owners public –– allowing OCCRP and its partners to expose firms in the heart of Europe that were controlled by criminals and corrupt politicians from around the world.

But Luxembourg and other countries quickly pulled that data offline last week, following a judgment from the European Court of Justice that struck down an EU requirement that they provide this information to the public.

“This ruling is a total disaster,” said Drew Sullivan, OCCRP’s publisher. “The European Court of Justice has just done more to help organized crime and dark money flows than the worst criminal could manage.”

For journalists, publicly available beneficial ownership A "beneficial owner" is the person who ultimately controls a corporate entity and stands to profit from it. Often this is the same as the legal owner, but in complex corporate structures, the beneficial owner may hide himself behind proxies or other companies. registries are a key tool for exposing corruption and financial crimes like money laundering. In what OCCRP dubbed the “OpenLux” project, our members and partners used this data to uncover secret Luxembourg companies used by Italian mafia figures to hide their money, Serbian political insiders to do business with criminals, and children of Russian oligarchs to keep vast real estate holdings.

After last week’s judgment, such a project is likely impossible in Europe. Worse, non-EU countries may follow Europe’s example and roll back progress on corporate transparency made over the past few years. That’s bad news not only for journalists, but for everyone.

Last year, for example, OCCRP reporters from Turkmenistan, whose government is one of the world’s most corrupt and repressive, used information from the U.K. beneficial ownership register to show how their government had been doling out food import contracts to the president’s nephew. Perhaps in an effort to cover his tracks, he had set up his food import company in the United Kingdom.

The withdrawal of public beneficial ownership information could also compromise Europe’s efforts to track down the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs and Kremlin allies. Earlier this year, OCCRP reporters used ownership information from the Cypriot corporate registry to track down the assets of Andrei Kostin, a sanctioned oligarch known often as “Putin’s banker.”

“Without the new beneficial ownership register in Cyprus, I would never have been able to identify the proxy owner that Kostin used to secretly own villas, apartments, and hotels across Europe and Russia,” said Graham Stack, the reporter who wrote the story.

As such reporting shows, corporate secrecy allows some of the worst actors from some of the world’s most corrupt countries to move stolen money into the West. Open access to company ownership information is one of the few ways to make them think twice.

To make that point as forcefully as we can, we’re using this page to bring together our and our partners’ investigations that relied on publicly available company ownership data to make major revelations.

We will continue to add updates with more information on the ruling and its implications, plus more examples of journalism enabled by public access to ownership registers.

“Transparency is critical to democracy,” Sullivan said. “It doesn’t help to save your privacy if you lose your soul in the process.”