European Court of Justice strikes again at transparency. We call for ending corporate limited liability

KUALA LUMPUR, 21 SEPTEMBER 2026 —

Andres Knobel ■ The European Court of Justice strikes against transparency again. Our response should be to call for an end to corporate limited liability Our beneficial ownership lead and acknowledged international expert Andres Knobel has had it.

The momentum that started with the Panama Papers a decade ago and positioned Europe at the vanguard of beneficial ownership transparency is undoubtedly gone following the infamous European Court of Justice ruling of 2022 that invalidated public access to beneficial ownership information. But it did not end there. The weaponisation of privacy is now sweeping away transparency regulations that predate even the advent of beneficial ownership transparency.

On 3 September 2026, the European Court of Justice managed to sink even lower by invalidating public access to shareholder information . This counter-secrecy reform based on the weaponisation of privacy is not just affecting beneficial ownership data or public access to information.

Since 2022, rulings by the European Court of Justice and by the European Court of Human Rights have invalidated access by tax authorities to banking information as well as to company formation data held by law firms . But let’s get back to the issue of beneficial ownership and shareholder information.

The September 2026 ruling that invalidated public access to shareholder information follows the same line of argument as the 2022 ruling that invalidated public access to beneficial ownership information: the general public does not need access to shareholder information because competent authorities and obliged entities (eg banks and lawyers) are the ones responsible for fighting money laundering and other illegal activities (para 79).

For this reason, according to the Court of Justice, it should suffice for access to shareholder information to be based on demonstrating a legitimate interest, just as is now the case for access to beneficial ownership information in the EU (para 89). The ruling’s arguments may sound sensible in theory, but they do not apply to real life. First and foremost, “legitimate interest access” does not work in practice.

“Legitimate interest” may sound like a good balance between privacy and the public interest, but it is usually a way to deliberately or inadvertently restrict access. For instance, in Argentina, where shareholder information had always been publicly accessible, the Commercial Registry decided to restrict access to shareholder information based on a legitimate interest when a former vice president came under investigation for corruption .

Journalists and legislators investigating the vice president were found not to have a legitimate interest and had to go to court to request access. In the EU, the 2022 Court of Justice ruling reinstated access to beneficial ownership information based on a legitimate interest (as required in 2015 by the 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive), even though legitimate interest access had already proven not to work in the past.

It was because legitimate interest was ineffective that, in 2018, the EU established public access to beneficial ownership information, until the Court invalidated it in 2022. Unfortunately, the second time’s not the charm. Transparency International reported in 2025 that legitimate interest access to beneficial ownership information was not working properly in most EU countries .

Second, it is disheartening that the Court did not consider the impact, or lack thereof, of its rulings in real life.

Despite shareholder information having been publicly available online for decades in a number of countries, from Latvia and the UK to Ecuador and New Zealand, without any evidence of misuse, the Court made it clear that “it does not matter whether the information in question relating to private life is sensitive or whether the persons concerned have been inconvenienced in any way on account of that interference” (para 67).

For the Court, the mere fact that the information is publicly available is bad enough. Nor does the Court consider whether authorities have the staff and resources to implement legitimate interest access and respond to requests for access to beneficial ownership information, and now also to shareholder information.

The ruling makes clear that a theoretical infringement of the right to privacy outweighs any practical difficulties faced by authorities: “although the referring court indicates that the national companies register, which is the data controller, might not be in a position to determine whether each person requesting information does in fact have a legitimate interest in accessing the personal data concerned, it should be borne in mind that any practical difficulties associated with verifying the existence of a legitimate interest are not such as to demonstrate that an interference with the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Charter is strictly necessary” (para 83).

As mentioned above, the Court’s arguments for invalidating public access to shareholder information are similar to those used to invalidate public access to beneficial ownership information. Our work on privacy washing and the weaponisation of privacy also applies here.

The first argument we could repeat is that “private family life” should stop, or at least be limited, when an individual goes outside their private family home and engages in “public” acts such as coming before a government authority to create a company that can sue other people, own assets with the protection of private property (and thus exclude others), limit the liability of its members against all of society and sometimes even get a bailout from the government.

None of these corporate acts are “private” matters. Second, we could argue that information on shareholders would be unlikely to say anything about the wealth of those individuals (para 70), given that there is hardly any integration between asset ownership and corporate registries , and that ownership of an unlisted and unknown company says very little about one’s wealth.