In a world where billion-dollar corruption and money laundering schemes can travel through developed countries' financial institutions undetected, the only chance for any country's authorities to successfully address financial crime is to apply cutting edge technology for crime detection. At the...

Many beneficial ownership registration frameworks fail to obtain beneficial ownership information from listed companies for two main reasons. Either high thresholds in the definition (based on percentage of ownership or voting rights) prevent the identifying of any beneficial owners, or listed...

This paper comparatively examines the registration and disclosure requirements of the ownership of legal entities (such as companies) and arrangements (such as trusts) across 133 jurisdictions, including all OECD and EU member states as of April 2020. Beneficial ownership transparency is widely...

There are serious shortcomings in the international and European framework rules for companies' beneficial ownership identification, verification and policing of the system, the FATF's (2012) 40 recommendations and the 4th EU Directive on anti-money laundering (2015) respectively. This paper...

Individuals and companies are legally able to set up any type of structure they want, from a simple one where the only shareholder of the company is at the same time its beneficial owner to a very complex structure involving many layers spread across several secrecy jurisdictions. While it’s...