What we don't know about corporate ownership. A study of ownership chains in 500 multinationals

Abstract

This article investigates who ultimately owns the top ten shareholders of 500 of the world’s largest multinational corporations (MNCs) and asks why this information is so often not publicly available. Using ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) research, it identifies the real owners for only 5.8% of all 4,973 ownership chains in the sample. Over 80% of the top ten shareholders are institutional investors, including BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, three leading providers of investment funds. The lion’s share of fund assets managed by the Big Three are domiciled in Delaware, in addition to Ireland, the UK and Luxembourg, all of which offer advantageous tax and legal regimes to investment funds. Institutional investors in a handful of jurisdictions are thus responsible for the vast majority of unknown ownership. This lack of transparency cannot be blamed on tax havens alone, however; there are gaps in UBO frameworks around the world, which fail to account for intermediated investment.