European Business Ownership and Control Structures (EBOCS)

ended

The European Business Ownership and Control Structures (EBOCS) project is specifically targeted towards public Counter Crime Agencies (CCAs) including European Asset Recovery Offices (AROs); Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) and Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) involved in the fight against financial and economic crime. The objective of the project is to provide simplified and unified access to Business Registry (BR) data on business ownership and control structures for financial analysis and investigation purposes thus increasing the level of transparency on legal entities available today. At the core of EBOCS is a digital platform of interconnected business registers that provide real time and direct access to officer and owner information. EBOCS also provides CCAs with a Visualisation Tool (VT) that allows analysts and investigating officers to quickly search and trace ownership structures across multiple jurisdictions in a visual format that is pertinent to their investigation activities. This will deliver significant resource and time savings. The expected outcomes are that FIUs, AROs and other competent authorities will have easier access to information contained in the Business Registers. For the 18-month piloting period, CCAs will have access to over 22 million companies and the underlying officer and owner information from 8 participating business registers. We will also provide access to the beneficial ownership registers of at least 2 participating BRs. EBOCS is fully aligned with the activities of the Annual Work Programme to support Union actions under the Internal Security Fund – Police cooperation and crime prevention. EBOCS specifically delivers under the objectives of the Organised Crime priority. A core objective of this action is to achieve active piloting by the target CCAs users that will fully qualify EBOCS and thus provide a compelling case to establish a production level service.