Open Ownership
Links to beneficial ownership registers.
URL
https://www.openownership.org/en/
Description
OpenOwnership helps countries to publish standards-compliant beneficial ownership (BO) registers, which give details of the actual human owners and the people who can benefit from an entity's operations and profits, or control its activities.
It's important to know a company's beneficial owners as sometimes other people or entities (e.g. a trust or shell company) are entered on the corporate register, meaning that if you only search that register, you may not find the actual owners. An increasing number of countries are requiring disclosure of beneficial ownership.
Open Ownership makes it easy to see if a country has a BO register, and if it is available to the public - each country has a page with this information:
To search for a country's page on OpenOwnership, scroll down to 'Find a specific country' on the map page.
The 'Worldwide action on beneficial ownership transparency' map shows which countries have BO registers:
An efficient way to get to see which countries have BO registers freely available online is to download the CSV that covers all the countries, and filter the 'Who can access' column by 'general public':
Cost
Level of difficulty
Requirements
Internet connection
Limitations
While a consolidated database of all BO registers would be incredibly useful, it's probably a pipe dream given that countries would have to decide to make BO disclosure a requirement of corporate registration, and they would have to make it openly available. So you still have to visit national online BO registers, if they exist, on an individual basis.
Ethical Considerations
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Guides and articles
OpenOwnership: Beneficial ownership primer
Tool provider
OpenOwnership
Advertising Trackers
Katherine de Tolly
Last updated
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