Beneficial Ownership Registers: Where Privacy Still Exists

Can anyone just look up who owns your company? In 2026 the answer depends entirely on where it is incorporated. Public access to EU beneficial ownership registers was effectively abolished by Europe's top court in November 2022. The aftermath has been slow and inconsistent. Offshore jurisdictions have been moving in their own direction — some opening slightly under international pressure, others maintaining confidential frameworks that remain fully compliant with FATF — the Financial Action Task Force, the global standard-setter for anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism financing rules whose 40 Recommendations define what every compliant jurisdiction must do. The map has been redrawn and the current picture matters for anyone with an international structure.

The 2022 CJEU Ruling That Changed Everything

The CJEU in Luxembourg. Its November 2022 ruling ended fully public UBO register access across the EU.

On 22 November 2022, the Court of Justice of the European Union sitting in Grand Chamber delivered a ruling that most compliance professionals had not seen coming and that transparency advocates described as a serious setback. The court concluded that provisions contained in the EU's Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directive requiring EU nations to establish public registers showing the true owners of companies domiciled in their jurisdictions were not compatible with the rights to respect for private life and the protection of personal data. In plain terms: the fully open public access model that the EU had been building since 2018 was declared fundamentally incompatible with the EU's own human rights framework.

The judgement ruled that "the provision whereby the information on the beneficial ownership of companies incorporated within the territory of the Member States is accessible in all cases to any member of the general public is invalid." The CJEU judgement does not say that public access is never justified, but it does underscore the importance of appropriately balancing privacy concerns with the public interest benefits arising from public access to beneficial ownership information.

The EU in 2026: Fragmented, Inconsistent, Still Evolving

EU member states have interpreted the legitimate interest access rules differently, producing a patchwork of models across the bloc.

The EU's response was the Sixth Anti-Money Laundering Directive, AMLD6, which replaced open public access with a legitimate interest model: authorities and obliged entities get direct access; journalists and civil society working on AML topics are presumed to have legitimate interest; everyone else must make a case. Member States had until July 2025 to transpose the first set of requirements and until July 2026 to transpose the operational rules. The July 2025 deadline passed with eleven member states immediately hit with Commission infringement proceedings.

Separate from the AMLD6 implementation, a further CJEU ruling in May 2026 addressed the specific situation of Italy's suspended register and confirmed that access rules must be genuinely applied rather than used as a procedural excuse to make registers effectively inaccessible. On May 21, 2026, the CJEU delivered its long-awaited ruling on the protracted dispute arising from preliminary references submitted by the Italian Council of State concerning access to the register of beneficial owners, a dispute that had caused the non-implementation of the register's operability. The court confirmed that legitimate interest access is mandatory, but that member states cannot simply suspend their registers indefinitely while the legal questions remain unresolved.

EU Country by Country: Who Sees What

What was once a one-click public search is now a multi-step process requiring demonstrated legal interest, a fee, and often days of waiting. For compliance professionals this is an administrative burden. For beneficial owners it is a meaningful improvement in practical privacy.

Offshore Jurisdictions: Where Confidentiality Is Still Legally Protected

Caribbean offshore jurisdictions maintain confidential UBO registers within FATF-compliant frameworks. Nevis remains one of the strongest globally.

Outside the EU, the picture is considerably more varied and in some jurisdictions considerably more favourable from a privacy standpoint. The key distinction to understand is between confidentiality and secrecy. Secrecy means refusing to share information with anyone, including legitimate law enforcement requests under formal legal channels. That model has been effectively dismantled under FATF pressure globally. Confidentiality means maintaining information in a private register, accessible to authorities under formal legal processes but not publicly searchable. That model remains alive and well in several well-regulated offshore jurisdictions, and it is entirely legitimate.

Nevis remains one of the strongest privacy frameworks globally. Beneficial ownership information is maintained by the registered agent and submitted to the Nevis Financial Services Department but is not publicly accessible. Any access requires formal legal process within Nevis, where foreign judgments are not automatically recognised. Jurisdictions like Nevis continue to uphold corporate confidentiality with stronger safeguards than offshore centres that have moved toward legitimate interest access models.

Seychelles operates a similar model. Seychelles legislation requires beneficial ownership information to be filed privately with registered agents, but this data is never published publicly. The Seychelles Financial Intelligence Unit holds the information and cooperates with international partners under formal channels, but there is no public register. The combination of low formation costs, strong privacy, and FATF compliance has made Seychelles one of the most widely used jurisdictions globally for holding companies, foundations, and international business structures — including the layered trust and foundation arrangements we explored in detail in Trust vs Foundation vs Company: Asset Protection Compared.

British Virgin Islands has moved. The 2026 amendments to BVI company law allow third parties with legitimate interest to access beneficial ownership information. This means BVI privacy is no longer absolute. For those who structured through BVI specifically for its confidentiality, this is a material change. The legitimate interest test in BVI broadly mirrors what the EU has implemented, but the application process and the categories of persons with legitimate interest are still being worked out in practice. The BVI's move creates an opening for requests that would previously have been impossible.

Cayman Islands moved to a legitimate interest access model in April 2025 under the Beneficial Ownership Transparency Act. In April 2025, Cayman introduced a new beneficial ownership framework, opting to grant access on a legitimate interest basis to those who can demonstrate that the information is required for preventing, detecting, investigating, combating or prosecuting money laundering, related predicate offences, or terrorist financing. The Beneficial Ownership Transparency Regulations 2026 introduced a CI$250 annual fee for access, contingent on demonstrating legitimate interest. This is not public access, but it is a step further than confidential-only models.

The UAE Position: No Public Register, Compliant Framework

The UAE holds UBO data across mainland authorities, DIFC and ADGM — none publicly searchable. Zero tax and private registers make it an exceptionally attractive base.

The UAE is not subject to AMLD or CJEU rulings. All UAE mainland companies and free zone entities must register beneficial owners with the relevant competent authority — Ministry of Economy, the emirate authority, DIFC Registrar, or ADGM Registration Authority. None of these registers are publicly searchable. The information is held by the authority and shared only with UAE law enforcement or under formal international legal assistance. Combined with zero income tax, zero capital gains tax, and zero inheritance tax, the UAE makes an exceptionally attractive base for holding international assets. 1Stop Connect and its accredited program partner structures holding arrangements across the UAE and offshore jurisdictions with these considerations central to the advisory process.

What This Means for Your Structure in Practice

Beneficial ownership privacy is now a distinct factor in jurisdiction selection — one that varies sharply from country to country.

If you have EU-incorporated entities, check the current access model for each country now — the rules vary and are still changing. If you have BVI entities, review whether Nevis, Seychelles, or a UAE free zone now provides stronger confidentiality for your purpose following the 2026 amendments.

Beyond jurisdiction selection, does your structure include a trust or foundation at the top that holds shares in any of these entities? Trusts in particular occupy a separate and often more favourable privacy position. A trust does not appear as a shareholder in a company register in the same way that a natural person does. The trustee appears as the legal owner, and the beneficial ownership information for the trust sits in the trust deed and the trustee's own records, not in the company's public filing. This is one of the reasons that well-structured trust arrangements remain one of the most effective tools for maintaining privacy within a compliant framework — a point covered in depth in our article Trust vs Foundation vs Company: Asset Protection Compared, including why European foundations like René Benko's Stiftungen failed where offshore structures would have held. 1Stop Connect's holdings and trust services specifically address this layer of planning for clients with cross-border structures.

Fourth, are you up to date on the new EU threshold? Compliance obligations do not end at ownership registration — recent UAE regulatory changes such as the new Good Conduct Certificate requirement for visa applicants illustrate how quickly regulatory requirements can change and why staying current matters. The threshold for beneficial ownership has moved from "more than 25%" to "25% or more" — a small wording change that pulls more individuals into scope. The rules for multi-layered and aggregated ownership are tightened so that fragmented stakes can no longer hide a controller. If you hold exactly 25% of a company in an EU member state, you are now a beneficial owner who must be reported, whereas previously you would have fallen below the threshold.

Staying Compliant While Protecting Privacy

Privacy in this context means confidentiality from the public — not invisibility to law enforcement acting through proper legal channels.

It is important to be direct about what privacy in a beneficial ownership context means and what it does not mean. Every jurisdiction mentioned in this article as offering strong privacy protection requires accurate beneficial ownership information to be maintained, updated regularly, and made available to the relevant competent authority. None of them offer complete secrecy from law enforcement or from formal international information exchange under tax treaties or mutual legal assistance processes.

A jurisdiction that wants to avoid the FATF blacklist or greylist must have mechanisms for identifying the true owners of corporate entities, maintaining that information accurately, and sharing it with foreign authorities under appropriate legal channels.

Beneficial ownership information must now be maintained in central or semi-central registers in all of the jurisdictions covered, even where not public. Accounting record-keeping, annual financial returns and tax filings have tightened across the classic offshore jurisdictions over the last five to seven years.

Nevis, Seychelles, the Cayman Islands, Panama, Cook Islands and the BVI all operate within this framework. The privacy they offer is privacy from the general public and from third parties browsing databases. It is not invisibility from competent authorities acting through proper legal channels.

The practical implication for any client is that maintaining a confidential beneficial ownership position does not mean failing to disclose it. It means disclosing it to the right people — your registered agent, the relevant authority in your jurisdiction, your home country tax authority under applicable information exchange arrangements — and not to anyone else. This is exactly the model that legitimate wealth planning has always operated under, and it remains entirely achievable in 2026 with the right jurisdiction selection and structure design. For a full breakdown of how trusts, foundations, and holding companies each interact with beneficial ownership privacy, see Trust vs Foundation vs Company: Asset Protection Compared.

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