Denmark is the latest country to be added to the OpenOwnership Register, the global platform that brings together beneficial ownership information from around the world. Data from the Danish Business Register on about 300,000 companies can now be browsed and searched through our online portal. This addition also marks a significant milestone for us, taking the total count of companies represented in our database to over 5 million.

Denmark is one of the few European countries that has already implemented a public register of beneficial ownership. It has gone one step further by making this information structured and available under an open license. With new European anti-money laundering rules coming into force, public registers will be created across all member states. However, not all of them will be in open data format.

Why does this matter? At the moment, relationships that cross across jurisdictions are difficult to trace and understand. With every new data source added to the Register, more complicated transnational company ownership relationships become visible. For instance some companies in the United Kingdom report that they are owned by Danish companies:

By linking the Danish data up, we can follow the trail of ownership one step further, to the individuals resident in Denmark who are the ultimate beneficial owners.

OpenOwnership aims to bring together data from many different countries - in Europe and beyond. This is necessary not only because we are doing more business internationally, but because many illegal activities that harm society - money laundering, tax evasion, fraud - also take place across borders.

Growing the number of countries and companies on the Register is core to our mission and we’re already lining up some more exciting pilot projects with countries looking to implement their own registers. As always, if you’d like to find out more you can:

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