Open Ownership aims to increase the availabilty of corporate beneficial ownership (BO) information world-wide: who owns what companies? To promote transparency in this regard, OpenOwnership lobbies governments and produces guidance on the publication of BO data.
This makes it a natural sibling to OpenSanctions: not just because both efforts want to increase the availability of public data, but also because linking sanctions/PEPs data and data about corporate ownership makes intuitive sense in the search for potential conflicts of interest or illicit behaviour.
That's why we were incredibly excited to be invited to present OpenSanctions at a recent technology showcase webcast organized by Open Ownership's CTO, Stephen Abbott Pugh. The presentation was recorded and is available here:
A definite highlight of the webcast was the presentation by Antonia Volkotrub from AntAC, Ukraine's leading anti-corruption watchdog. Antonia spoke about the way AntAC uses beneficial ownership data in its PEP.org.ua project and the investigations they have used it for.
