The Beneficial Ownership Leadership Group
The Beneficial Ownership Leadership Group came together in 2019 to drive the global policy shift towards free, open beneficial ownership data. By joining the Beneficial Ownership Leadership Group each country signs up to a set of best practice disclosure principles. Convened by OpenOwnership and Open Government Partnership, the group is comprised of Armenia, Kenya, Latvia, Mexico, Nigeria, Slovak Republic and the United Kingdom.
Governments increasingly recognise the value of beneficial ownership transparency for promoting effective governance and efficient markets. It builds market confidence and helps businesses manage risk, facilitates effective taxation, helps save money on schools and hospitals, and tackles corruption.
Find out more: Leadership group terms of reference
Principles
- Publishing company beneficial ownership data that is freely downloadable, searchable, and reusable by the public, without a fee, proprietary software, or the need for registration.
- Implementing progressively ambitious best practice in beneficial ownership transparency, across technical, legislative, regulatory, and administrative parameters.
- Committing resources to enable improvements and iterations to data quality and standardisation.
- Contributing to the building of best practice, including by recognising the evolving illicit finance threat and considering implementing beneficial ownership transparency beyond companies to a wider group of assets classes.
- Working in partnership with civil society and enabling their role as watchdogs and users of the data.
- Engaging other partners, including governments and international institutions, to advance the objective of making beneficial ownership transparency a global norm; and
- Contributing to evaluation and impact assessment of our shared approach.
By joining the leadership group, governments publicly signal their intention to adhere to the following principles on beneficial ownership data disclosure (note: these do not represent legally-binding commitments for signatory states).
Members
The leadership group remains open to all governments that are making determined efforts to improve the transparency and/or quality of their beneficial ownership data. If you would like further information about the group and how to join please contact us at support@openownership.org