Defining and capturing data on the ownership and control of state-owned enterprises
Summary
This guidance note supports implementers of beneficial ownership registers. It focuses on why more transparency is needed about the corporate governance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), sharing considerations on defining and declaring their ownership or control.
While SOEs play a critical role in the global economy, opaque ownership and control of SOEs risk creating a weakness which could undermine the specific aims of beneficial ownership transparency reforms.
The specific risks associated with SOEs and their prominent role in natural resource governance in many countries make it crucial for there to be a greater understanding of information about SOEs above and beyond standard beneficial ownership practices, which often focus on ownership through shareholding.
There are five main considerations for government implementers captured within this guidance:
- Defining SOEs
- Ensuring comprehensive coverage of SOEs
- Establishing which control mechanisms to record
- Deciding whether to list individuals or role titles
- Capturing structured data
Case studies in this document are primarily drawn from the collation of publicly available information on two SOEs and the representation of this information as structured data.
The case studies chosen are Pertamina, a state-owned oil and natural gas corporation in the Republic of Indonesia, and the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC), a for-profit oil corporation that partners with foreign companies to extract Nigeria’s fossil fuel reserves.
Learnings from this exercise helped to establish key areas for consideration by governments seeking to adopt a more structured and standardised approach to collecting information on the ownership and control of SOEs as part of a disclosure regime.