MANAGER
In recent years, we’ve had a breakthrough in ownership transparency, but now there are dark clouds on the horizon.
PROPERTY REGISTER: Two percent of private property in Norway is foreign-owned. Efforts are now being made to ensure transparency. Photo: Javad Parsa / NTB
sea View
Manager: This is an editorial in the Dagbladet, and it expresses the newspaper’s point of view. Dagbladet’s political editor is responsible for the editorial.
Who owns Norway? If you want to look up who owns companies in Norway, you can find out if the ownership is only here in Norway. If the company is owned overseas, this possibility disappears.
As a result, we lose much of the overview of who owns what in this country.
And it’s not a trivial matter.
A suit mapping done by Skatteforsk at the Norwegian University of Environment and Life Sciences showed that in 2017, two percent of all private property in Norway was foreign-owned. This corresponds to values of NOK 235 billion.
Of the corporate-owned buildings, 10% are foreign-owned. Foreign ownership therefore makes up a significant percentage and the increase is by far the largest from countries considered tax havens.
Foreign ownership that’s not a problem in itself, but as long as it hides the houses that are the real owners, it increases the risk of, among other things, money laundering and tax evasion. It can also pose a risk to security policy, which Dagbladet has highlighted in various ways in recent months revelations about Russian ownership of centrally located properties.
There was a breakthrough for transparency on the property in 2018, but now there are dark clouds on the horizon.
Warns of hidden Russian assets
EU Money Laundering Directive since 2018 it has laid the groundwork for the establishment of property registers in several European countries, including one in Norway which will open after the new year.
25 of the 27 EU countries have now created property registers.
But a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice is now putting a spoke in the works for further work, writes the Vårt Land newspaper.
A private individual in Luxembourg sued the European Commission to close Luxembourg’s open register. The person owns several companies in Luxembourg and is, among other things, the head of a private airline that he started with a former KGB officer. He believed the registry violated privacy and posed a risk to his safety. The European Court of Justice ruled in favor of him.
In rapid, and perhaps not entirely random, succession, country after country has now closed off access to its records. Within hours, Luxembourg closed the registry, followed by the Netherlands and Cyprus, before Austria, Belgium, Malta and Germany did the same.
And now?
It is disputed what consequences this might have for Norway’s property registry. But equally decisive is the outcome at the European level. The EU Money Laundering Directive will probably need to be adapted to take account of the findings of the Court of Justice of the EU, but a compromise shouldn’t lead to too strict control of who has access, as some have already argued.
Transparency about who owns the crucial knowledge in a free and just society.
