Ultimate Beneficial Owners Registers in the EU — the oceans and the deserts of data
It has been already 3 years since the 4th AML Directive requires EU member states to set up registers of the ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) of legal entities. How the UBOs Registers in Europe looks now in 2019? Have all the countries created them? And which of them are already fully opened what claimes the newest, 5th AML Directive?
The 4th and 5th AML Directive call for UBOs Registers
According to the 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (known also as the 4th AML Directive) all the European Union members are obliged to set up the beneficial ownership registers to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. Moreover, they had time till June 2017 to implement legislation and start doing the work done.
What is also important, UBOs Registers didn’t have to be open. It was (and currently still is) enough, that they are available to the relevant authorities, financial intelligence units and any person or organization who can demonstrate so-called ‘legitimate interest’ to access the data.
According to its successor, the 5th AML Directive, UBOs Registers should also be accessible without indicating any ‘legitimate interest’. In other words, they should be open in the future, but less EU countries than you think are ready for that.
The List of Ultimate Beneficial Owners Registers in the EU
For now, April 2019, the situation of UBOs Registers in the European Union seems to look like a landscape of oceans and desserts of data.
Only 15 of the 28 member states has national UBOs Register at the moment and only 3 countries out of the rest 13 announced concrete dates when registers are going to be set up — Belgium, Finland, and Poland.
Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Portugal declared that their national UBOs Registers are going to appear till the end of 2019 and the Netherlands indicated the end of 2019 or the beginning of 2020 as a date of the release.
What is more, only 5 out of 15 UBOs Registers that now exist in the EU are open. Those are UBOs Registers of Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia, United Kingdom, and Estonia. In the first four, access to the information about the ultimate beneficial owners is free. In Estonia, isn’t. You have to pay 1€ per 1 company check, but it’s still better than no access at all (unless you’re a financial institution).
This list of fully open Ultimate Beneficial Owners Registers is going to be enlarged in the closest year with the UBOs registers of Belgium, Finland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal.
Ultimate Beneficial Owner definition in the European Union countries
How do the EU members determine ‘UBO’?
Each country has its own UBO registration requirements but getting it together, we can generally say that the UBO (Ultimate Beneficial Owner) is:
- an individual who actually owns or controls entity and in favor of whom the entity operates its activity. Hence, UBO is the natural person or persons who are the ultimate owner of the client or who control the client or the natural person or persons for whom or on behalf of whom the business relationship is established or an occasional transaction is carried out,
- has at least 25 percent of shares, of voting rights, of economic interest in the company,
- directly or indirectly, has the right to appoint or removed the majority of the board of directors,
- functions as a person occupying a senior management position, where none of the above criteria are met.
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