New beneficial owners register in Ireland

A new central register is coming into force in Ireland next month. All Irish firms “will be obliged to list the beneficial owners of any major shareholdings”, reports RTÉ. “If the companies fail to list all the beneficial owners, they may face tens of thousands of euro in fines, and ultimately even jail time”.

The measure is one of the requirements first introduced by the European Union’s 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD4), whose objective is to curb AML and fraudulent practices across the union. The institution of beneficial ownership registers on a national level is the first step in a process whose end goal is to enhance the interconnection and consistency of member states’ registers, to foster better information sharing.

This represents a major change that all Irish businesses should be aware of and get ready to comply with. In fact, from June companies will be required to file beneficial ownership data with the registry through an online portal (businesses will have until the end of November to submit their information).

At Know Your Customer, we welcome any measures aimed at promoting transparency and limiting the penetration of dirty money in our societies. When verified and reliable information about companies’ beneficial owners becomes readily available, compliance teams can perform their KYC checks much more efficiently, thus better protecting their business from the risk of money laundering and terrorism financing.

Know Your Customer’s solution seamlessly integrates with company registries from around the world to automatically retrieve ultimate beneficial ownership information and build complex company structure charts in seconds. To discover more, request a demo here.