TED, a non-profit group, is well-known for its conferences packed with “Talks”—polished presentations featuring leaders from business, technology and the arts. Since 2005 it has also awarded an annual prize, now worth $1m, to support potentially world-changing ideas. Past winners include the ONE Campaign, backed by Bono, U2’s frontman, and chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. This year the gong has gone to a darling of financial-transparency campaigners: Charmian Gooch, a co-founder and director of Global Witness (pictured). The group, which is backed by George Soros, specialises in investigating and exposing corruption in minerals transactions in poor countries. As Global Witness has tirelessly pointed out, much of the corruption is made possible (or at least easier) by anonymous shell companies, which are open to abuse by drug lords, sanctions-busters, kleptocrats and their cronies. Ms Gooch and her colleagues liken shells to getaway cars—for money launderers rather than bank robbers.

These Potemkin companies are a big problem for poor countries: they have facilitated hundreds of billions of dollars of illicit outflows over the past decade. But the source of the problem is often rich countries. Corporate secrecy is particularly strong in America. Registration agents aren’t even required to collect and hold ownership information in states like Delaware and Nevada. (Just today your reporter received an email containing evidence that a Delaware shell company implicated in large-scale cocaine trafficking last year is still registered in the state and in good standing.)

Corporate anonymity has become a hot topic in tax, transparency and development circles. In the past couple of years governments in advanced countries have begun to move on the issue, in large part because of the stink kicked up by Global Witness and its comrades-in-advocacy. The big breakthrough came when David Cameron pledged that Britain would set up a publicly accessible register of corporate owners and persuaded other rich countries to take the issue more seriously. The European Parliament, too, recently threw its weight behind public registers. Nevertheless, resistance to change remains strong.

At the TED conference in Vancouver this week, Ms Gooch unveiled her “TED Wish”: “For us to know who owns and controls companies, so that they can no longer be used anonymously against the public good.” She will use the money from TED and the publicity to supercharge an existing campaign to eliminate (realistically: reduce) corporate secrecy. She called on global leaders “to enact laws to create public registries which list the true owners of companies, and that can be accessed by all—with no loopholes.”

Winning such a prestigious prize gives Global Witness an opportunity to tap into the business and technology expertise of the TED community. Ms Gooch asked attendees to help build a database of anonymous companies and develop a model corporate register. She has called on big businesses to offer public support. The nod from TED makes it harder for them to ignore her.

Some hope it will also help to push along legislation that has stalled in America’s Congress, requiring states to include in their incorporation applications a question asking for the company’s “beneficial” (true) owners. The bipartisan sponsors of a Senate bill, Carl Levin and Chuck Grassley, were encouraged enough by the announcement to issue a press release applauding it and calling on lawmakers to stop delaying. The bill is supported by the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, which talks of the need to “eliminate the corporate fox-holes that criminals cower in.”

The forces opposed to reform in America are powerful, and include the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Bar Association and some senior senators. A number of European governments, including Germany’s, are sceptical too. But the campaign to prise open company ownership has been gaining momentum for some time, and TED’s acknowledgement of its importance will give it extra oomph.