1/20 Dear friends, I need to draw your attention to something super bad and super important (and it doesn’t originate from Russia for once). Last week the EU has taken a shockingly stupid and damaging decision to close down national corporate registers of beneficial owners 🧵🧵🧵 
2/20 It will no longer be possible for the public to learn who really owns a European company. I'm genuinely astonished.The Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) registers are vital to the work of investigators, activists, researchers — anyone who fights corruption.
3/20 Let me first explain what those registers were, so you understand the extent of the damage. Up until now anyone could use European UBO registers to find information about the actual owner, a physical person behind any legal entity. It wasn't super easy but it was possible.
4/20 Some countries would make you file a written request and pay a fee to obtain this information. Some would ask you to register using your national ID. You did need to jump through some hoops here and there, but the information was still accessible.
5/20 It’s a simple transparency provision. A firm can still be owned by a chain of anonymous offshore entities from exotic islands, but if you want to operate in Europe, you have to disclose the name of the actual person behind it.
6/20 Removal of public UBO registers throws us back into the dark ages. Back to the era of shady dealings, shell companies and unrestricted money laundering. There isn't a law enforcement agency in the world that is able to tackle corruption on its own. Public scrutiny is vital.
7/20 It’s also the biggest present Putin’s corrupt cronies can dream of. This enables them to launder money like in the good old days. Just register the firm that owns your Côte d'Azur villa to a blind trust from Belize, and you’re all set. Sanctions? Pff, no one will know.
8/20 Here is an example from one of our recent investigations. The San Roque golf club, a luxurious golf resort in Spain worth €40m was purchased by a Cyprus firm CITERNE HOLDINGS. The club is a true gem: 50ha of beautiful land, 2 golf courses, several private villas onsite.
9/20 Who owns it? Good question. In the corporate register of Cyprus, we can see that CITERNE is owned by PIANTA INVESTMENTS from Seychelles. Seychelles is one of the dirtiest jurisdictions, there's no way of knowing who owns a firm there. Seems like a dead end. But it's not.
10/20 We make a request to the Cyprus register of UBOs. We pay €3.5, scan and send the receipt over email and 3 days later…Voila! We get the document that has the name of the person behind the Seychelles firm. And that person is the stepson of the Russian deputy prime minister
11/20 Please forgive me for skipping a lengthy explanation of everything that is wrong with the stepson of the acting vice prime-minister of Russia owning a 40m golf club in Spain while his stepmother's job as a minister is to fight poverty and social inequality in Russia.
12/20 Let's move across the border to Portugal and have a look at his magnificent €10m villa instead. It is owned by EVRICA MANAGEMENT S.A., a Portuguese 'sociedade anonima': an anonymous legal entity that doesn't have to disclose its owners’ to the public. Dead end? Not really.
13/20 We just need to use a different register, the UBO one. Anyone who has an account with the Portuguese state services portal can request an extract. For free. That’s how we found out that this villa belongs to the very same stepson of the Russian deputy prime minister.
14/20 Is this valuable information?Of course. Will freezing those assets purchased with stolen Russian money be a good thing for Portugal? Sure. Did we violate anyone’s privacy? Not really, we only revealed his name/DoB. Perhaps we violated his privacy to steal. Sorry, not sorry.
15/20 The person hiding behind the alias ‘WS’ has a different opinion though. He filed a complaint to the Luxembourg court saying that the UBO register violates his privacy.
16/20 This person owns 35 commercial firms and one property investment company and claims that if anybody found this out, he and his family would be kidnapped, harassed and subjected to violence. (dude,what sort of business are you running?!?)
17/20 Last week the Court of Justice of the European Union sided with ‘WS’, and since its decisions apply to all union members, 27 member states have to close down their UBO registers. The Netherlands, Austria and Malta already did. Rest to follow.
18/20 This is the biggest blow to fighting against crime and corruption we have seen so far. It goes against everything we have learnt from Panama Papers, Pandora Papers etc. It erases at least 10 years of work of anti-corruption fighters (like us).
19/20 Corruption and money laundering strive in darkness. The Court of Justice of the European Union has just turned all the lights off. This decision favours oligarchs and criminals and makes the EU the safest haven for dirty cash.
20/20 I firmly believe that if the institutions aren’t working you have to scream and shout about it until they do. And I urge everyone to get involved - campaign, write to MEPs, demand answers, spread the word. This needs to be reverted for the benefit of all of us.
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