Focus: Opacity of business ownership in Italy, the Netherlands and United Kingdom

Opacity of business ownership is one of the key ML vulnerabilities of the IARM risk assessment model. Thanks to the access to the largest available data-set on business ownership data at global level (pro-vided by BvD), and to the development of innovative proxies for business opacity. This chapter provides a further in-depth investigation of these data, comparing results across countries and business sectors and identifying major patterns and trends. As in the country analysis, the opacity of business ownership is analysed with respect to two sub-dimensions: • The level of complexity of businesses’ ownership structure as such; • The volume of business ownership connections with shareholders and BOs from risky jurisdictions.