Improving beneficial ownership transparency in Ukraine: Review and recommendations
Glossary
Beneficial owner
A real, living person who ultimately controls, has influence over, or materially benefits from a company or other legal entity. The control or benefit could be either direct or indirect, e.g. via intermediate entities, nominees, or contractual agreements.
Beneficial ownership chain
The entire chain of entities that are linked by their control of one company, starting at that company and stretching to the beneficial owner, including any intermediate companies.
Business process
The functions and practices that result in published (and usable) beneficial ownership data.
Open data
Digital “structured” or “machine-readable” data that is “made available with the technical and legal characteristics necessary for it to be freely used, reused, and redistributed by anyone, anytime, anywhere.”[1]
Public access
Beneficial ownership data is made available to any user with no access restrictions (e.g. registration, fees). This does not mean that all data in the registry needs to be publicly available; sensitive data, such as a beneficial owner’s home address, identification codes and passport details of individuals, can be held back and available only to relevant authorities. A beneficial ownership register can be publicly accessible without being available in open data format - for example, individual records could be searchable by the public, but the data cannot be downloaded in bulk as structured data. Thus, it is important to define both terms.
Use case
A description of the needs different classes of users have when they use an application or web site, and how they will use the web site to perform tasks that help them reach these goals.
Footnote
[1] OpenOwnership Briefing on Beneficial Ownership as Open Data