Bridging the gap for effective asset transparency: Analysing land registers and beneficial ownership data for legal vehicles
Summary
This working paper examines how land registers can support effective asset transparency by assessing the extent to which land registration systems can be connected to beneficial ownership (BO) information for legal vehicles. Drawing on four case studies, it compares land registers that primarily focus on recording legal ownership and registrable rights – illustrated by HM Land Registry (HMLR) in England and Wales, United Kingdom (UK) and the Estonian Land Register (Kinnistusraamat) – with land transparency systems that collect BO information for land through declarations – as in Scotland’s Register of Persons Holding a Controlled Interest in Land (RCI) and British Columbia, Canada’s Land Owner Transparency Registry (LOTR).
Across the cases analysed, the paper finds that land ownership and rights registers – when effectively linked to well-functioning BO registers for legal vehicles – can provide a similar or greater understanding of BO networks than land-specific BO declaration regimes. This is most evident where land registers record a broad range of interests and rightsholders in structured format, use reliable identifiers, and can be connected to BO information for both domestic and non-domestic legal vehicles, as illustrated by the UK and Estonian cases. However, this approach has limitations: indirect control or benefit relationships exercised through person-to-person arrangements without an intervening legal vehicle are not consistently captured. Such relationships are more clearly surfaced by land transparency regimes like Scotland’s RCI, while more formalised declaration-based systems, such as British Columbia’s LOTR, enable systematic disclosure of indirect interests held through legal vehicles. However, the latter face challenges for comparison and integration with other datasets where overlapping BO regimes apply different definitions, thresholds, and reporting timelines.
Overall, the findings suggest that strengthening existing land ownership registers and BO registers for legal vehicles, as well as improving their interoperability, may offer a more scalable and proportionate foundation for asset-level beneficial ownership transparency (BOT) than creating new, standalone land BO declaration regimes. At the same time, land BO registers can add value in specific contexts by revealing forms of control or benefit not visible from legal ownership alone. The analysis highlights how register design choices shape trade-offs between visibility, verifiability, and interoperability, with applications that extend beyond land. It also underscores the need for user research to determine which categories of interests and levels of detail are required for different policy objectives.