Wikidata:Property proposal/beneficial owner

‎beneficial owner

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Organization

Done: beneficial owner (P12621) (Talk and documentation)

Description	natural person or persons who ultimately owns or controls the company
Represents	beneficial owner (Q2585784)
Data type	Item
Domain	item
Example 1	Schwarz Gruppe (Q712034) → Dieter Schwarz (Q78308)
Example 2	CMA CGM (Q1023867) → Rodolphe Saadé (Q3438372)
Example 3	Energetický a průmyslový holding (Q4162216) → Daniel Křetínský (Q11774225)
See also	owned by (P127)

Motivation

Property needed to describe natural person or persons who ultimately owns or controls the company. We have owned by (P127), but it is used for the immediate owner (can be a legal entity). The ultimate owner is often hidden in a complex ownership structure. --Jklamo (talk) 00:34, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Notified participants of WikiProject Companies --Jklamo (talk) 23:54, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Jklamo please write a property description that makes the concept clear. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 01:35, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Weak support Good idea, this can be quite useful, but it would be good to avoid duplication with "owned by". Let's wait for more input from others. Germartin1 (talk) 13:41, 18 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Support In Indonesia, to prevent money laundering and terrorism funding, we have a law that specifically defines what a 'beneficial owner' is. The criteria used include (1) more than 25% share control/voting power/company profit received each year, along with (2) the sole authorization power to appoint, replace, or dismiss the board member. I wonder if there is a similar legal definition in other countries. Rtnf (talk) 14:57, 24 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Comment I use owned by (P127) qualified with object of statement has role (P3831)=beneficial owner (Q2585784) for those (e.g. Q106466436#P127). It might be better to have the relationship modeled explicitly, but I'm not sure (general support for subproperties is weak). --Mormegil (talk) 07:05, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Mormegil,@ChristianKl,@ArthurPSmith:Is there some idea of whether owned by (P127) and/or "beneficial owner" would be considered transitive relations, thereby making use of value hierarchy property (P6609)? I'm not sufficiently experienced with the latter property to explain what the statements would look like. --SM5POR (talk) 11:29, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, for this proposed property, this does not make sense to ask: When X → P:BenOwner → Y, Y cannot have the P:BenOwner property at all, since Y needs to be a physical person, which is obviously not owned by anyone (beneficially or not). (But owned by (P127) is a transitive property, isn’t it?) (I don’t understand value hierarchy property (P6609) at all, so no help there.) --Mormegil (talk) 17:20, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Mormegil,@ChristianKl:I agree that if the object item of the "beneficialowner" property is always a natural person, as stated in the description (I'm myself unfamiliar with the terminology used in trade relations"), then of course there is no room for additional layers of beneficial ownership allowing us to even consider the issue of transitivity. --SM5POR (talk) 10:59, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@ArthurPSmith: why are you marking a property that has no description as ready? ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:55, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- It was sufficiently well described under Motivation. There's no description or label in most languages in general so I'm not sure why it's necessary but I've moved the relevant text into the template field now. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:58, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
- @ArthurPSmith: I see no reason to rush this proposal. Both support votes seem to be in support of having a property to handle it while not for a specific form. The second suggests that having some criteria like 25% share control/voting power/company profit could be a standard.
- If you want to create this property with your description you should argue why the 25% should not be there in the property description. Data is less useful if properties like this get created without working out how to best define them. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 16:32, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  - Oh, no “25% criteria”, please! The point of this property is not to choose some “important subset” of the owned by (P127) claims! (For that, we use proportion (P1107) as a qualifier, you don’t need a special property for “owners with more than 25% share”.) The point of this property is to note the physical person(s) being the beneficial (final) owner of the company, even when the company is owned by a complicated opaque chain of offshore holding companies etc. (and these persons are therefore not listed as owners on the item!) See e.g. the above-linked example of Czech Equestrian Team (Q106466436): It is 100% owned by Sundown Farms Limited (Q106466447), a Cypriot holding company, which is in turn owned by BVI offshore holding companies… But the point is that Czech Equestrian Team (Q106466436) is “really/in fact/beneficially” owned by Renáta Kellnerová (Q19602629) (99%). (Another example: JetBrains (Q1688472) is 100% owned by an opaque Dutch holding company; but “really/beneficially” it is owned by Sergey Dmitriev (Q107676519) & Valentin Kipyatkov (Q106977267).) There might be differences how each country defines the beneficial ownership (and how much the beneficial owners must be known), how much of the data is public, etc. But we can add qualifiers and references for each case, there is no point in trying to make a global definition where such a global unity does not exist in real world. --Mormegil (talk) 17:20, 8 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Mormegil,@ChristianKl:I agree also that the proportion (P1107) qualifier should eliminate the need for an arbitrarily chosen 25% criterion in the definition of this property. But that also suggests to mr that the "beneficial owner" should technically be possible to derive from multiple owned by (P127) statements on the condition that owned by (P127) really is transitive. I believe it is, but I suppose it should be spelled out explicitely using value hierarchy property (P6609) before we can use it in that way, and that's why I brought up the transitivity issue. --SM5POR (talk) 11:07, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    The problem is that in exactly those cases this property would be most useful, you don’t know a complete chain of owners, as they are hidden behind opaque offshore holding companies, etc. For instance, Seyfor (Q41567950) is 72.7% owned by Ligelta Holdings Ltd (Q102357016). You say “we don’t need a new property to say Seyfor (Q41567950) is 72.7% really/beneficially/transitively owned by Martin Fedor (Q43926795), we can just derive the fact from applying owned by (P127) transitively”. But we don’t know owned by (P127) for Sandberg Investment Fund SICAV PLC (Q115137827)! (We only know its beneficial owner (or, rather, the beneficial owners of Seyfor (Q41567950)), thanks to the mandatory registration of beneficial owners.) --Mormegil (talk) 15:11, 9 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    @Mormegil,@ChristianKl:Strictly speaking I don't claim we don't need the proposed property, only that it is derived from information that could be expressed using owned by (P127) and proportion (P1107) if we had that information in the first place. you have a good point about thesource being different in these complexcases. If and when this proposal is adopted, I suppose we could impplment some constraints regarding mutual existence and conistency of owned by (P127) and the new property on the same item as they show interrelated facts, plus making sure statements regarding beneficial owner contain at least one reference, and possibly the valid in place (P3005) qualifier in case the exact criterion of who is "beneficial owner" is limited to a particular jurisdiction. --SM5POR (talk) 09:39, 10 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support as per @Mormegil:. @SM5POR: you don't seem to understand that Ownership data is deliberately hidden by beneficial owners by using offshore destinations, for the purpose of tax or sanction avoidance. A useful resource is https://www.openownership.org, in particular https://www.openownership.org/en/topics/beneficial-ownership-data-standard/ --Vladimir Alexiev (talk) 02:07, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

i do well understand that some (not all) ownership data may be deliberately hidden (the "complex" cases). As I don't want to unnecessarily prolong lhis discussion, let me clarify that I have no objection whatsoever to the creation of a "beneficial owner" property and I can even voice my full support for it. I'm sorry I didn't state that earlier. The only reason I even joined the discussion in the first place was that I wanted the relationship to other properties suchas ̣̻P|127ˌ and the transitivity of the latter explicitely spelled out in the documenation, perhaps resulting in some helpful constraints once the property is created. nothing urgent that needs to be resolved now, that is. Pls go ahead and create the property, I see no problem with it. Unfortunately, I had some technical problems posting my comments earlier, which may have confused what I was trying to say.--SM5POR (talk) 10:13, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support European law implemented in all EU member countries. Geertivp (talk) 17:13, 4 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Jklamo, ChristianKl, Germartin1, Rtnf, Mormegil, SM5POR: @Vladimir Alexiev, Geertivp:

Done: beneficial owner (P12621) --Lewis Hulbert (talk) 11:32, 16 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]