Finding the real owner of a company: a guide to beneficial ownership in the EU, UK, and beyond

Since 2023, the Zedcex and Zedxion crypto exchanges have handled roughly $1 billion worth of transfers to people and entities affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), according to a recent report from TRM Labs.

Companies House, the UK's open corporate registry, listed a woman named Elizabeth Newman as the 'person with significant control' of both exchanges. Companies House is one of the most useful registries in the world. The data is open, searchable by person or company name, and corporate documents are downloadable as PDFs.

But it also has a flaw that afflicts many country business registries: it often doesn’t list the ultimate beneficiary owner (UBO) of an entity. That’s the person(s) who actually controls the entity, or a chain of connected entities. And until very recently, Companies House didn't verify the identity of people listed in its corporate records.

In the case of Newman, reporters at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed that she was a fake persona created to obscure the true owner of the exchanges, a convicted embezzler.

“By allowing Newman to front these entities, the U.K. provided a veneer of Western legitimacy to a crypto network alleged to have helped bypass global financial blockades,” OCCRP reported.

Online corporate registries are a wonderful thing for investigators. Individual sites like Companies House and OpenCorporates, the king of open corporate registration data, are essential OSINT tools. But the data is often incomplete, misleading, or serves to conceal the true beneficiary. That’s because many governments haven’t implemented the policies and systems necessary to capture and verify UBO information and to make it easily accessible. 

A business registry isn't the same as a beneficial owner registry. You need the latter to make strong conclusions and connections. Those who can afford to subscribe to due diligence and AML platforms can sometimes access such data. You can also often pay a firm to gather information from a specific jurisdiction. But access is unequal, inconsistent, expensive, and often not efficient for large scale investigations. That’s good news for money launderers, terrorists, scammers, and all manner of crooks. 

However, progress is being made, albeit slowly. In fact, 2026 should be a significant year for access to beneficial ownership across the EU, in the UK, and in some overseas UK jurisdictions that have traditionally been a struggle or dead end for UBO information. 

To be clear, it doesn't mean that anyone will be able to easily access all UBO data in these jurisdictions this year. But there are changes that journalists, researchers, and all manner of investigators need to be aware of.

In many ways the progress in the EU is the result of efforts to restore access to UBO information that was restricted due to a 2022 court decision. (The ruling four years ago found that such data was “seriously interfering with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data.”)

This report provides an overview of recent or upcoming changes to beneficial ownership in the EU, UK and related overseas territories, as well as to free resources that investigators can use to examine corporate ownership and in some cases related assets. I spoke to experts from OpenSanctions, Transparency International, OCCRP, the Data and Research Centre, and to Stephen Abbott Pugh, a former journalist who worked for Open Ownership and now consults on open ownership data.