News & Thoughts
De Facto Control – Control with less than 50% ownership
Control is an important topic in relation to Anti Money Laundering, and most AML legislation addresses the topic of control. In certain situations, when someone owns significantly more than the other owners and there are many small shareholders, one should consider the largest owner as controlling even if they own less than 50%.
The effect of BO definition deviations in Norwegian legislation
A challenge that came with the new register, is that the Beneficial Owners definition deviates from the Norwegian Anti Money Laundering legislation. This inconsistency reduces the value of the Beneficial Owners register as an information source in the AML work for obliged entities. This article illustrates the effect of the deviations.
Beneficial Ownership – How difficult could it be?
There are several reasons why you, as an AML officer, can't rely entirely on the content of beneficial owners registers. Beside the obvious reason that the AML legislation require that you verify the information through independent sources, all beneficial owners registers depend on data reported by the companies themselves. These data may be intentionally or unintentionally incorrect.
Circular ownership and Beneficial Owners
Circular ownership makes it difficult and not intuitive to calculate who are the Beneficial Owners of a company. Circular ownership creates a difference between direct ownership and the integrated/indirect ownership, and this discrepancy makes it hard to understand who is actually a Beneficial Owner.
EU’s AML Single Rulebook and Beneficial Ownership
In this post, we present our views on the Beneficial Ownership definition found in the newly published Single Rulebook.