Representing beneficial ownership¶
Key requirement: If a person is a beneficial owner of an entity - whether directly or indirectly - and the person or entity is required to declare this beneficial ownership, there MUST be an Ownership-or-control Statement connecting the two which represents the beneficial ownership relationship.
Overview¶
Beneficial owners can exercise ownership-or-control directly in an entity (expected to be a company) or indirectly, via intermediary entities (such as arrangements or other companies). It must be clear in a BODS dataset which people are declared as beneficial owners of which companies (and which entities are intermediaries). And it must be clear what overall control or ownership beneficial owners have (regardless of whether it is direct or indirect).
In the above situation, Person 1 indirectly benefits from a 15% shareholding in Company E and Person 2 has a direct 32% shareholding in Company E. In a jurisdiction where people with a shareholding (direct or indirect) of over 10% in a company should be disclosed as beneficial owners, both Person 1 and Person 2’s interests would be declared. Additionally, the jurisdiction may require that details of Person 1’s indirect interest are disclosed. That is: that some details of the chain Company E - Company A - Person 1 are also disclosed.
In BODS, the following properties are used to represent such information disclosure:
beneficialOwnershipOrControl
(See Interest)directOrIndirect
(See Interest)componentStatementIDs
(See OwnershipOrControlStatement)isComponent
(See EntityStatement)
Requirements¶
The beneficial ownership relationship¶
If a person is a beneficial owner of an entity, entity X, whether directly or indirectly, and one of them is required to declare this beneficial ownership:
There MUST be a primary Ownership-or-control Statement connecting the two which represents the beneficial ownership relationship. In particular:
the entity’s Statement MUST be the
subject
;the person’s Statement MUST be the
interestedParty
;isComponent
MUST be false;the
interests
which make the person meet the criteria for their being declared a beneficial owner MUST be included in this primary Ownership-or-control Statement if known; andthe
interests
in (d) MUST havebeneficialOwnershipOrControl
set to ‘true’.
If beneficial ownership is known to be exercised indirectly, via intermediary entities then
directOrIndirect
MUST be ‘indirect’. If it is known to be exercised directly thendirectOrIndirect
MUST be ‘direct’. OtherwisedirectOrIndirect
MUST be ‘unknown’.
Intermediaries¶
Where beneficial ownership is known to be exercised indirectly, via known intermediary entities, this SHOULD be represented in addition to the above. In particular:
The chain of known intermediary entities SHOULD be represented by secondary Entity Statements, Ownership-or-control Statements and Person Statements.
These secondary statements SHOULD link the beneficial owner’s Statement to entity X’s statement indirectly.
These secondary statements SHOULD all have
isComponent
set to ‘true’.These secondary statements SHOULD all have their
statementID
values listed in thecomponentStatementIDs
array of the primary Ownership-or-control Statement.When the primary Ownership-or-control Statement is published in a BODS file:
all secondary statements referenced from
componentStatementIDs
MUST also be published in that file;all secondary statements must appear before the primary Ownership-or-control Statement in the list of statements.
Example¶
In the following example, Person 1 is a beneficial owner of Company E. They exercise that beneficial ownership via an intermediary company, Company A. (Note: abbreviated statement IDs are used for brevity and clarity of explanation. Short IDs like ‘ooc-2’ are not valid in BODS.)
Statement order¶
An example of valid statement order for the above would be: p-1, e-1, e-2, ooc-3, ooc-2, ooc-1.