>it's not even possible to categorically determine the owner of an international cargo ship due to the fact that mazes of opaque offshore (shell) company ownership is still not just possible and easy, but effectively "the norm".

Panama, Liberia, Uzbekistan, etc. etc. have better things to care about than keeping accurate paper trails about corporate ownership to make life easy for tax auditors in air conditioned first world offices.

Unless you can somehow magically make them rich enough to solve all their big problems to the point where opaque chains of ownership seems worth caring about the symptom will persist.