For much of the past decade the direction of travel was clear. One jurisdiction after another moved to make public the question of who really owns a company, on the principle that ownership held behind layers should be open to scrutiny. Registers were created, and in a number of places they were opened to anyone who wished to look.

That direction is no longer simple. In Europe, a senior court found that giving the general public unrestricted access to such registers went too far, and access across much of the region has since become narrower and more conditional. Elsewhere, public registers have remained open. Elsewhere again, ownership must now be reported to the authorities but is not available for general view. The result is a patchwork, and one that is still moving.

For a person whose interests are held through companies, this matters in a specific way. The visibility of their ownership is not a settled fact. It depends on where each entity sits, and on a policy argument that has not finished. A register that is closed today may open. A register that is open may close. The exposure changes without the person doing anything at all.

This is easy to overlook, because ownership structures are usually arranged once and then left in place. The assumption is that the arrangement made at the outset continues to mean what it meant at the outset. In a shifting environment, that assumption does not hold.

The sensible response is not to try to predict the policy argument, which cannot reliably be done. It is to know, at any given moment, what each relevant register currently shows, to understand how the rules in each jurisdiction are moving, and to treat the visibility of ownership as something to be reviewed rather than assumed.

What is open and what is closed is no longer a fixed feature of the landscape. It is a variable. It should be watched as one.