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Comment by lottin | Hacker News Reader

> You can easily approximate the net wealth of any company owner in the EU

I don't see how. Unless you're talking about a people who owns a significant percentage of a publicly-traded company, but that's most certainly not "any company owner". Probably less than 1% of the population.

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The entries in EU business registries are public for all companies, not just publicly traded companies. You can check who owns how much of what company and you can also check their yearly reports. In most countries this comes at a small fee for the registry extract, but the information is readily available, in some countries it's even free. As an example, here's the Estonian business registry extract for the company Foobar OÜ (I'm not affiliated, I just searched for foobar) [0]. This is not a publicly traded company, yet you can see who owns the company in what fraction and if you download the latest annual report you can also see how much the company is worth.

This information is legally required to be available to prevent money laundering, fraud, other financial crimes, etc.

[0] https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/12199449/Foobar-O%C3%...

Business registries are no longer open, as there was a court case in Luxenbourg where one of Putin's fixers lobbied to get his private information closed.

Ultimate Beneficiar Ownership information can be only accessed by authorities.

Well, I don't know about you, but I can see the beneficiaries in the above example just fine, and last I checked I was not part of an authority.

When I search for ‘Toyota’, none of the results list the ultimate beneficiary owners.

e.g. ‘ Toyota Baltic Aktsiaselts (10234087)’ lists 1 senior manager under ‘Beneficial owners’… which is clearly nonsense.

He probably doesn’t even own 50% of the intermediary company registered in Estonia… let alone 100%.

Edit: And ‘SIA Toyota Material Handling Baltic Eesti filiaal (11629379)’ doesn’t list anyone at all in that section.

Toyota is your example of an EU company?

Toyota Baltic Aktsiaselts is an EU company and it has a fake ‘beneficial owner’. But clearly some entity, or series of entities, must actually own it.

So it is an example of the information in at least one section being completely unreliable, with not even an attempt of an ‘owned by non-eu parent company’ disclaimer explaining why it’s fine to list a random senior manager as something that he’s clearly not…

Companies have to have at least some minimum registration where they conduct enough business.

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