Charting New Waters: Strengthening Fisheries Governance through Beneficial Ownership Transparency
Towards Better Use of Beneficial Ownership Information in Fisheries
The majority of countries have implemented or are implementing central BO registers for corporate vehicles across different sectors of their economies to comply with international AML standards. [38] This provides significant potential to leverage these existing efforts to help improve accountability and sustainability of the fisheries sector. Outlined below are recommendations for what actions various groups can take to navigate a range of policy, legal and technical considerations to begin operationalizing the use of BO data in fisheries.
Governments
- Ensure a robust foundation for BOT reforms for corporate vehicles in law, including a broad purpose for the reforms and a single, unified definition of BO, with explanations in subsidiary legislation on what this means when applied to corporate vehicles, and separately when applied to vessels. Legislation should not be limited to a narrow purpose, such as AML, but be anchored in a broader purpose of ensuring the functioning and preventing the abuse of corporate vehicles. Consider using lower disclosure thresholds for companies involved in fisheries, as has been done elsewhere for higher-risk sectors. [39] In doing so, implementing agencies should consider the conceptual difference between the BO of corporate vehicles and that of their underlying assets, such as fishing licenses and vessels.
- Provide sufficient access to BO information to user groups linked to the fisheries sector. This could include both those inside and outside of government, and enable them to make meaningful use of the data. Access should be given without undue restrictions and in line with privacy and data protection legislation.
- Ensure asset registers such as those for licenses and vessels capture information about the various parties that hold specific direct interests, in addition to legal ownership. For a fishing license, this would be the license holder, or whomever the license is leased to. Where these parties are corporate vehicles, reliable identifiers should be collected in order for this information to be connected to BO information of corporate vehicles, so that where a corporate vehicle is one of these parties, their beneficial owners can be identified.
- Ensure a whole-of-government approach to collecting, verifying and sharing BO information for corporate vehicles, leveraging shareholder information where available, empowering one agency to be responsible and ensuring coordination mechanisms between that agency and others in the fisheries sector to connect information automatically and at scale. This should serve to minimize duplication or conflicting sources of data. Where a central register for corporate vehicles already exists, decide on which types of interests in fishing rights and vessels respective agencies should capture and consider how to reduce any overlap with BO information already held.
- Consult with all relevant actors involved in the fisheries sector during the development of BO reforms and provide them with direct BO data access when registers are available. This could include stakeholders such as fishing directorates, fishing licensing, vessel registration, maritime and coastguard authorities as well as customs and tax authorities. Ideally, this will be structured data, available for bulk download and including reliable identifiers for the corporate vehicles, licenses and vessels.40 Making information accessible to other users, such as CSOs and journalists, enables them to play a key role in ensuring accountability of the sector.
- Consider adding crimes in the fisheries sector as predicate offenses for money laundering, particularly where there is crime convergence with other organized crime. Moreover, if fisheries licensing, vessel registration and maritime and coastguard authorities were made competent authorities, it would enable data sharing between these agencies and FIUs.
- Consider requiring domestic incorporation for vessel registration or acquiring fishing licenses to ensure relevant parties are captured by disclosure requirements.
Regional Fisheries Management Organizations
- If not directly gathering BO information, RFMOs should encourage and require Member States to adopt implementation standards for their registers of fisheries-related assets and BO of corporate vehicles, particularly with respect to legal definitions, data structure and data access. They can help define a common set of minimum information to be included in national license and vessel registers.
- Given their existing regional networks, RFMOs should seek to facilitate the regional sharing of domestic information about fisheries-related assets and BO of corporate vehicles among member countries. This would enable, for example, members of the same RFMO to see if applicants for a fishing license in their country have beneficial interests in IUU-linked operations in another country.
Industry Actors and Investors
- Companies operating in the fisheries sector and their investors should, call for greater transparency in the fisheries sector and, where possible, embed the use of BO information into due diligence checks and other business processes. Such checks should be conducted when considering financing a new operation, leasing vessels or selling on part of a quota to a third party, as well as when conducting reviews of risk in the value chain. This will help ensure that operators or investors are not inadvertently partnering with individuals or organizations complicit in IUU fishing or related illicit activities.
Civil Society
- Call for greater transparency in the fisheries sector, particularly around BO information for entities operating in that sector. Where such information is disclosed, CSOs can also play a valuable role in using the data in their own research and investigations, including highlighting discrepancies between declared ownership information and their own findings.
Footnotes
[38] Open Ownership, “Open Ownership map: Worldwide action on beneficial ownership transparency”.
[39] Some jurisdictions have defined the BO of a corporate vehicle using a lower threshold for share ownership and voting rights for high-risk sectors, notably the extractive industries.
[40] For more information, see: Kadie Armstrong and Stephen Abbott Pugh, Using reliable identifiers for corporate vehicles in beneficial ownership data (s.l.: Open Ownership, 2023), https://www.openownership.org/en/publications/using-reliable-identifiers-for-corporate-vehicles-in-beneficial-ownership-data/.