Beneficial ownership data from Armenian mining companies added to Open Ownership Register

Caption: Journalists and civil society representatives learn how to use beneficial ownership data during a workshop in Armenia

High-quality beneficial ownership data from Armenian mining companies has been added to the Open Ownership Register. You can now more easily search, examine, and visualise examples of Armenia’s data thanks to the country’s adoption of the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS).

BODS is the world’s leading open standard providing guidance for collecting, sharing, and using high-quality data on beneficial ownership.

This work has been delivered as part of the Opening Extractives programme, a joint initiative between Open Ownership and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) to catalyse the availability and use of beneficial ownership data globally.

The Open Ownership Register combines beneficial ownership datasets from multiple countries to follow complicated ownership and control structures wherever the data leads. Data from the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Slovakia is already ingested, mapped to BODS, and made available to download or reuse for free. Open Ownership is also working to add data from more countries.

Armenia's Multi-Sector Register was launched in 2020 to collect beneficial ownership data. This followed significant support from Open Ownership to the Armenian government agencies overseeing the country's beneficial ownership reform process during 2019 and 2020.

In June 2021, the government passed a new series of laws to unify its legal definition and update its beneficial ownership regime. With an initial focus on extractive-industry companies, the Multi-Sector Register started capturing and publishing data in line with BODS later that year.

Armenia also makes use of the open source BODS visualisation library to create automatic diagrams of beneficial ownership networks. During 2023, the scope of the Multi-Sector Register has expanded to companies operating in other sectors across the economy.

To demonstrate how the collection of standardised beneficial ownership data in line with BODS helps countries leverage a range of open source tools, Open Ownership has incorporated data disclosed by a number of extractive-industry companies listed by the EITI team in Armenia into the Open Ownership Register. Thanks to these efforts, any data produced in line with BODS can be incorporated into the Open Ownership Register.

To support Armenia’s innovative use of the alternateNames field in version 0.2 of BODS, Open Ownership will also be expanding the functionality of the Open Ownership Register so that people can find these Armenian companies, as well as millions of other companies, by searching for their alternative names.