Beneficial Ownership Registers

Beneficial ownership (BO) information identifies the real natural person or persons who ultimately own, control, or benefit from a legal entity or legal arrangement, as distinct from the entity's registered or nominal owner. A beneficial ownership register is a government-maintained database collecting this information, designed to unmask the shell companies and layered corporate structures frequently used to conceal the true parties behind corrupt transactions, bribery payments, and money laundering. Beneficial ownership transparency sits primarily at the Prevention and Sanction stages of the anti-corruption value chain, both deterring the formation of concealment structures and, where ownership is later found to be concealed, supporting asset tracing and recovery. ^[1]

1 Access models

The paper describes three models jurisdictions use to govern who may access beneficial ownership information once collected. Under a Restricted model, access is limited to designated government authorities, such as law enforcement, tax authorities, and financial intelligence units, for defined official purposes. Under a Limited model, access is extended beyond government to a defined set of private actors with a demonstrated legitimate need, such as banks and other entities conducting customer due diligence under anti-money laundering obligations. Under a Public model, the register, or a defined subset of its contents, is made freely available to any member of the public, including journalists, researchers, and civil society organizations, without the requester needing to demonstrate a specific interest. ^[1]

2 Indonesia's Central Beneficial Ownership Registry

Indonesia's Central Beneficial Ownership Registry has offered free public access since 2022, placing it firmly within the Public access model. The paper reports that Indonesia is in the process of expanding the registry's use beyond passive disclosure, integrating beneficial ownership data directly into criminal investigations, business licensing decisions, and public procurement decisions, so that ownership transparency functions as an active screening input at multiple points of government decision-making rather than solely as a public-facing transparency measure. ^[2]

3 International legal framework: FATF

The principal international legal framework for beneficial ownership transparency is set out in the Financial Action Task Force's Recommendations 24 and 25, adopted in 2012. Recommendation 24 addresses the transparency of legal persons, requiring countries to ensure adequate, accurate, and current beneficial ownership information on companies is available to competent authorities, while Recommendation 25 extends comparable requirements to legal arrangements such as trusts. ^[3] These recommendations underpin the domestic beneficial ownership legislation subsequently adopted by FATF member and observer jurisdictions, including the United States and the United Kingdom.

4 The US Corporate Transparency Act

The United States enacted the Corporate Transparency Act to require covered companies to disclose beneficial ownership information to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). The paper notes, however, that a 2025 FinCEN ruling exempted American companies from the Act's reporting requirement, with the effect that the statute's enforcement now applies, in practice, almost exclusively to foreign companies operating in the United States rather than to domestic entities. ^[4] This narrowing significantly reduces the Act's reach as a tool for exposing beneficial ownership concealment by US-formed shell companies, a gap the paper flags as a substantial limitation on the framework's original anti-corruption and anti-money-laundering purpose.

5 The United Kingdom's registers

The United Kingdom maintains two relevant registers: the Register of People with Significant Control, covering UK-incorporated companies, and the Register of Overseas Entities, which requires foreign entities owning UK property to disclose their beneficial owners. Transparency International UK's 2024 analysis of these registers identified continuing deficiencies in data verification and enforcement, finding that funds linked to overseas territories and flagged as high risk had entered the UK in amounts totaling almost £6 billion, despite the existence of the disclosure regime. ^[5] The analysis is cited by the paper as evidence that the mere existence of a beneficial ownership register does not guarantee effective transparency absent robust verification of the information submitted to it.

6 The British Virgin Islands' restriction

Moving in the opposite direction from the trend toward public registers, the British Virgin Islands adopted a "legitimate interest" test in 2025 restricting access to its beneficial ownership information (BOI) to those able to demonstrate a specific, defined interest in obtaining it, narrowing what had been a comparatively more open access regime. ^[6] The paper presents this as illustrative of continuing international divergence over how open beneficial ownership access should be, with some jurisdictions expanding public access even as others move to restrict it.

7 Relevance to the 1MDB scandal

The paper connects the case for beneficial ownership transparency directly to the 1MDB scandal, in which opaque beneficial ownership structures, including shell companies whose true owners were obscured across multiple jurisdictions, were central to the movement and concealment of billions of dollars diverted from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. The scandal is cited as a demonstration of the scale of harm that inadequate beneficial ownership transparency can enable, and of the corresponding value of registers, verification requirements, and public or law-enforcement access in closing off that avenue for concealment. ^[7]

See also: Anti-Corruption Value Chain, 1MDB Scandal, Asset Tracing and Recovery Technology.

References

1. APEC Policy Support Unit, Technologies for Preventing, Detecting, and Combating Corruption, Issues Paper No. 15, June 2025, APEC#225-SE-01.10, section on beneficial ownership registers.
2. Ibid., section on Indonesia's Central Beneficial Ownership Registry.
3. Financial Action Task Force, Recommendations 24 and 25, 2012, as cited in APEC Issues Paper No. 15.
4. Ibid., discussion of the US Corporate Transparency Act and the 2025 FinCEN ruling exempting American companies.
5. Transparency International UK, 2024 analysis of the Register of People with Significant Control and Register of Overseas Entities, as cited in APEC Issues Paper No. 15.
6. Ibid., discussion of the British Virgin Islands' 2025 adoption of a "legitimate interest" access test.
7. Ibid., discussion of the 1MDB scandal in relation to beneficial ownership opacity.