Improving beneficial ownership transparency in Ukraine: Review and recommendations

Summary and conclusion

In major economies around the world, the companies register is understood to be a critical piece of business infrastructure, providing visibility and assurance, and playing a key role in creating a trusted, effective business environment. In recent years, with the increasing importance of data in many aspects of life and new capacities to analyse and combine this data in productive ways, many registers have moved toward publishing their data as open data, accelerating growth in access to, and utility of, these registers.[38]

The UK has been a world leader in this field. As the former Chief Executive of UK Companies House, Tim Moss, said last year: “We support the economy by providing data and allowing people to make decisions, compare companies they’re going to do business with or not, and if nobody looks at the register we might as well pack up and go home.”[39]

Ukraine is joining the UK in becoming a world leader on corporate transparency, including by becoming the first country to commit to integrating with the Open Ownership Register. We look forward to working with the Ministry of Justice and NAIS on reaching the ultimate goals of this transparency: the reduction of corruption and strengthening of the business environment and good corporate governance in Ukraine.

In this spirit, we have made specific recommendations on improving data quality and on widening the scope of the information collected. We believe these changes are critical to ensuring a sustainable beneficial ownership regime in Ukraine.

Next page: Annex A: Collecting and publishing useful beneficial ownership data