Who Really Owns It

Who really owns it

Registries turn a brand into a legal entity with a number, dates, addresses, and named people. The thing nobody tells you first: registry structure varies enormously by jurisdiction, and that variance is the entire game. One country publishes full accounts, share registers, and directors' birth dates for free. Its neighbour publishes a name and a status code and charges for the rest. Your research strategy is not "look up the company" — it is "work out what this jurisdiction lets me see, then plan around the gap".

Second thing: search by company number, not name. The number is issued once and persists through renames, mergers, and dissolution. The name does not.

Triage

Registry-by-registry detail — what each exposes, its access model, and its identifier format: reference/registry-catalogue.md.

Method

1. Resolve the entity. Search the aggregator to find candidates, then go to the home registry and pull the canonical record. Record legal name, number, jurisdiction, entity type, incorporation date, status, and registered office. Note every former name — you will need them for litigation and media searches.
2. Pull the filing history, not just the summary page. The summary is a current-state view. The filing list is the timeline, and the timeline is where the story is.
3. Read the officer record. Names, roles, appointment and resignation dates, nationality and country of residence where published, service address, and in some registries a birth month and year — which is a genuinely powerful disambiguation anchor for find-anyone.
4. Read the ownership record. Share capital, share classes, allotments and transfers, and the beneficial ownership declaration where the register has one.
5. Read the charges register. Charges, liens, mortgages, and security interests name the secured lender, and lenders are counterparties nobody thinks to look for. A company with no charges and no accounts has no evident financing.
6. Run the officer pivot. Take each officer's exact registry-normalised name and search the officer index for their other appointments. This is where a single entity becomes a network.
7. Run the address pivot. Search the registry by registered office. Then decide what the address actually is before you weight it — see below.
8. Screen. OpenSanctions for the entity and every named person. Report a hit as a review item, not a finding; transliterated name matching is noisy.
9. Graph it. Multi-entity results go to graph-the-network; the finished picture goes to x-ray-a-company.

Filing types and how to read them: reference/filing-interpretation.md.

Beneficial ownership, and where it stops working

Beneficial ownership registers ask a company to declare the natural persons who ultimately own or control it above a threshold. The trajectory has broadly been registers opened to the public and then, in several jurisdictions, re-restricted to those who can show a legitimate interest, after legal challenge on privacy grounds. Assume access is conditional and check the current model before planning around it.

Four structural failure modes:

• Nominees. A nominee director or shareholder is recorded, real, and economically irrelevant. Legal in many places. The register is accurate and useless.
• Trusts and foundations. They interpose a structure most company registers do not pierce. A company owned by a foundation can have a technically complete declaration and no identifiable human.
• Layering. A chain across four jurisdictions where each register sees only its own link. It is designed that way.
• Thresholds. A register capturing holders above a percentage is blind by construction to a group each sitting just below it.

The correct output when you hit one of these is a documented terminus: "control traced to entity X in jurisdiction Y, whose register is not public; declared beneficial owner is Z, who also appears as declared owner of 40 unrelated entities and is assessed as a nominee." That is a finding.

Registered agents and mass addresses

Every jurisdiction requires a registered address, and a formation-agent industry exists to provide it. A single address hosting thousands of companies is completely normal. Before weighting it, identify what it is: a law firm or accountancy practice hosting clients is ordinary; a virtual-office provider is mildly interesting; a residential address with hundreds of companies is not ordinary. The useful signal is not the count but the overlap — which specific other entities at that address share officers, filing agents, or filing dates with yours. Same-day incorporations at the same address by the same agent is a batch, and batches are worth looking at.

Offshore jurisdictions and leak-derived data

Several jurisdictions publish essentially nothing: name and status, sometimes not even that, with officers and owners held only by the registered agent. For these, the ICIJ Offshore Leaks database is a legitimate and widely used research source. It aggregates entities, officers, intermediaries, and addresses from several journalistic investigations into offshore structures, and it is often the only public visibility into a closed register.

Use it correctly. It is a historical snapshot, not a live register, so absence means nothing and presence is as-of the leak. It records structures, not wrongdoing — offshore incorporation is lawful and ubiquitous. Names are as recorded in the leaked documents, with the transliteration inconsistencies that implies. Treat a hit as a lead requiring corroboration against a filing, a court record, or a contemporaneous document, and be careful how you characterise it in writing. OCCRP Aleph indexes leaks alongside registries and documents and is worth running the same names through.

The officer pivot

The highest-value move available here. A person's directorship history across jurisdictions reveals prior ventures, dissolved companies, co-directors who recur, and business relationships that appear nowhere else.

Make it work: search the registry's normalised officer name form, not your preferred spelling. Try the surname alone in registries that allow it. Where the registry publishes a birth month and year, use it — it is the single best discriminator available for common names. Search former and married names. Account for transliteration: one person can appear under three romanisations of the same name across three registries, and no index links them.

Then verify. Two directorships under the same name are not one person. Confirm with a matching birth month/year, a matching service address, a matching co-director, or a corroborating source from find-anyone. The officer pivot's false-positive rate on common names is the main way this technique produces confidently wrong network diagrams.

Dissolved companies and the historical record

Dissolution removes an entity's legal personality; it does not usually remove its record. Most registries retain filings for years afterwards, and those filings are frequently the most informative in an investigation because they document a failure the principals would rather nobody found. Retention periods vary and some registries eventually purge, so archive dissolved-company filings when you find them. A director's trail of dissolved entities is one of the strongest single signals in corporate diligence.

Filing dates as a timeline

Read the filing history chronologically before you read any individual document. The pattern carries information the documents do not:

• Incorporation shortly before a transaction, a tender, or a pitch.
• A cluster of officer resignations, especially just before or after an accounts filing or an auditor change.
• A share transfer coinciding with a change of registered office.
• An abrupt shift from timely to late filing.
• A dormant company that suddenly starts filing activity.
• Filings backdated or submitted in a batch on one day, which usually means an agent catching up on a compliance failure.

Where this goes wrong

• Filed is not verified. Most registrars check completeness, not truth. A registry record proves a statement was made under a filing obligation.
• Staleness is built in. Annual filing cycles mean the published picture can be a year or more behind reality, and status fields update slowly after dissolution or restoration.
• Aggregators lag and normalise. A cross-jurisdiction index has partial coverage that varies by country, refreshes on its own schedule, and normalises names and roles in ways that lose detail. Confirm anything material at source.
• Name matching fails in both directions. Legal-form suffixes, punctuation, accents, transliteration, and post-merger renames create false negatives; common names create false positives.
• Wrong-registry errors. Federal versus state versus municipal registers, separate registers for branches of foreign companies, and entirely separate regimes for partnerships, cooperatives, trusts, and charities. Not finding an entity often means you searched the wrong register.
• Redaction regimes. Residential addresses and full dates of birth are suppressed in many registries, and some allow individual officers to apply for protection. A suppressed address is not a hidden one.
• Paid tiers hide the important documents. Several registries give a free summary and charge for the filings that actually matter. Budget for it or say in the report that you did not read them.

Confidence grading

• Confirmed — stated in a document filed at the primary registry or regulator, retrieved and dated, with the entity identified by number.
• Probable — from a reputable aggregator or an LEI record, consistent with the primary record, uncontradicted.
• Unconfirmed — inferred from a shared address, a shared name, or a leak dataset without corroboration.
• Assessed — your judgement, labelled as such, e.g. that a director is a nominee. State the basis and keep it separate from fact.

Grade identity attribution separately from the record itself. A filing can be genuine and still not be your person.

Worked example

Question: does the director of a UK supplier control other entities?

1. Registry record gives the company number, one director, and a birth month and year. Anchor established.
2. Officer index on the exact name form returns eleven appointments. Six share the birth month and year — same person. Five do not, and are set aside.
3. Of the six, two were dissolved after compulsory strike-off. Filing history on both shows accounts overdue before strike-off. Sourced and recorded.
4. Address pivot on the registered office returns roughly 300 entities, but it resolves to a chartered accountancy practice. Weighted low. Dead end.
5. Better signal: two of the six share a second director, who appears in the ICIJ database as an officer of an offshore entity. Recorded as a lead, graded unconfirmed, and taken to find-anyone for corroboration rather than written up as a link.
6. Output: six confirmed directorships, two adverse histories, one unconfirmed offshore association clearly labelled as such.

Pivots

Legal and ToS notes

Most registry data is published for reuse, but conditions differ: several national registries impose licensing terms, attribution requirements, or rate limits, and several offer an official API or bulk product specifically so you do not scrape the web interface. Use them. Officer personal data is personal data — residential addresses and full dates of birth are protected in many registers, and deliberately circumventing a protected-address regime is an offence in some jurisdictions. Beneficial-ownership access may require you to assert a legitimate interest; assert one you actually have, in writing. Leak-derived datasets are lawful to research and are published by journalistic organisations for that purpose, but characterising a named person as wrongdoing on the basis of a leak entry alone is both an evidential and a defamation problem. Corroborate, and write carefully.