Describing interests: Research note

  • Publication date: 10 July 2025
  • Authors: Tim Davies, Peter Low

Overview

We set out to understand the full range of ways in which current legislation and beneficial ownership disclosure forms categorise the relationship between a beneficial owner and a legal vehicle (interests).

This work is intended to help us:

a) inform updating the modelling of interest objects in the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) (towards version 1 of the standard); [1] and

b) explore beneficial ownership definitions that include “benefit” alongside “own” and “control”.

Footnotes

[1] See: Open Ownership, “Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (v0.4)”, https://standard.openownership.org/en/0.4.0/.

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