1. Diving into the UK
corporation
ownership with
Neo4j
Adam Hill
with the assistance of many, amazing volunteers

2. HELLO!
I’m Adam Hill
Data scientist &
Recovering astrophysicist
@astroadamh
horsewithapointyhat.com

3. DataKind UK acts as an intermediary introducing the charitable organisations to a
community of data scientists who are prepared to donate some of their own time to deploy
their data science skills for good works. One of the core ways this is done is through
DataDives, the data science equivalent of a hackathon.

4. What was the challenge?
Global Witness
A not-for-profit organisation that
campaigns against environmental and
human rights abuses that are often
derived from the exploitation of natural
resources and corruption in the global
political and economic system.
https://youtu.be/FyOVMqAIFw8
Open Corporates
The largest open database of
companies in the world. Their aim is
quite simple (though mammoth in
scale) - to create a url for every
single company in the world.
The goal
Using data from the original Companies House source, can we gain insight into UK
companies and see if there is cause for further investigation as well as uncover any
flaws in the data itself.
Joined by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Spend
Network 30-50 volunteers dived into the data, first prepping it for analysis with data
wrangling and munging to then using different analytical techniques like fuzzy
matching and network analysis to understand what the data might show.

5. A picture is worth a thousand words
A complex idea can be conveyed
with just a single still image,
namely making it possible to
absorb large amounts of data
quickly.

6. Special
shout-out
De-duplicating people listed at Companies
House is a nightmare! As Ned & Juan
discovered...
Check-out Ned’s solution:
https://nedyoxall.github.io/

7. What did we make?

8. Chains of control: It's quite easy to
visualise the complexity of control
amongst corporations by searching
for some of the longest chains of
control that exist in the database.
Self control: A primary requirement
of "beneficial ownership" is seeing
which people and corporations
ultimately own a company! So how
do you own yourself?

9. Large corporate structures: One of
the largest of the chains above is a
partial map of the healthcare
company Reckitt Benckiser.
Looking at tax havens:
Looking at connections to tax-haven
countries is relatively straightforward as
shown below in a network that shows
people and UK companies linked back to
the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman
Islands.

10. Mega Owners: One curiosity
was to look for who owned
the most companies in the UK
and the result was somewhat
surprising. There are several
individuals who report
controlling interests in
hundreds of companies.
However, the companies
typically have a single share
valued at £1.

11. What was our impact?

12. What did we find?
● Almost 3,000 companies (0.2% of the 1.3 million UK companies
that have registered their beneficial ownership data) are owned by
companies with tax haven addresses, implying they may not be
paying full tax on their activities in the UK
● 76 people listed as beneficial owners matched names and birth
month and year with a person on the U.S. sanctions list*,
potentially raising issues of corrupt leadership
● 19 people’s names and birth month and year matched senior
political figures, often referred to as Politically Exposed Persons*,
raising questions of potential conflicts of interest
● 267 people whose name and birth month and year matched those
of disqualified directors, ie people who have been banned from
being company directors for not meeting their legal
responsibilities.*
*Without further investigation we don’t know if this match points to the same people, as the
match is just birth month and year.

13. THANKS!
Any questions?
You can find me at:
@astroadamh
www.linkedin.com/in/adambenhill/
Horsewithapointyhat.com
Presentation template by
SlidesCarnival
Further reading
https://www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/what-does-uk-beneficial-ownership-data-show-us/
http://www.datakind.org/projects/using-open-data-to-uncover-potential-corruption
http://www.horsewithapointyhat.com/posts/data_dive_corporations/

14. “We are meticulously focused on
bringing data science in all its forms to
those who share our vision of a
sustainable planet in which we all have
access to our basic human needs. We
envision a world where organizations
tackling those problems have the same
access to data science resources that
Wall St. and Silicon Valley have.”
Jake Porway, DataKind Founder