Beneficial Ownership, Five Years on from the PSC
The UK Persons with Significant Control register opened in 2016. At the time, it was unusual; most jurisdictions held beneficial-ownership information privately, accessible only to regulators and obligated entities under formal request. A decade on, that picture has shifted further than most clients realise.
The European Union's Fifth Anti-Money-Laundering Directive required member states to maintain publicly accessible registers from January 2020. Ireland's RBO went live that year; France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg followed. The Court of Justice of the European Union restricted public access in November 2022 (the Sovim judgment, on data-protection grounds), but the registers continue to exist and to be accessible to obligated entities and to journalists demonstrating a legitimate interest.
Jersey and Guernsey opened their registers in 2021 and 2022 respectively. The Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands followed in 2024, in compliance with FATF Recommendation 24. The Cayman register requires a search fee but is accessible to anyone willing to pay it.
The remaining holdouts are smaller. Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong continue to hold beneficial-ownership data on a regulator-only basis; the UAE made the Dubai International Financial Centre register accessible to obligated entities in 2024 but kept it closed to the public.
What this means for a private client is that the number of jurisdictions in which beneficial ownership can be discovered through normal search has grown sharply. The audit reads the live registers across the desk's twenty jurisdictions. Where a client holds entities in jurisdictions that have opened their registers since the last time the client took an audit, the picture available has changed materially.
The strategic question this raises for clients is whether the structures established before disclosure became routine are still serving their original purpose. In many cases the answer is yes; the structures were established for legitimate tax, succession, or governance reasons that disclosure does not affect. In some cases the answer is more nuanced; structures established when disclosure was minimal may have features that read differently when disclosure is routine.
The audit does not advise on this; that is properly the work of counsel and tax advisers. The audit reads the position as it currently stands and identifies the items that have become visible since the last comparable reading. What follows from that is for the client and their counsel to determine.