In June 2016 the UK government launched the world’s first “beneficial ownership” register; a requirement for all UK companies to register who were the “persons of significant control”, PSCs, who actually controlled the company. Recent investigative journalism has made headlines with the leaking of the Panama and Paradise papers and it is clear that transparency in corporate ownership needs to be a significant factor within modern democracy. In a partnership between DataKind UK and Global Witness we have built the worlds first network graph mapping all of the UK public data on those who control corporate interests in the UK; it comprises in excess of 4.5 million companies and 4 million individual people. It has been enriched with company officer data and metrics of financial secrecy based upon geographic regions. The goal of the project was to enable Global Witness to search for "shady patterns" within corporate ownership networks to act as leads for investigative journalism to expose corrupt practices. Further more, we were able to analyse the completeness of the register and identify ways of improving such data structures to inform other world governments how to best build similar public registers of corporate ownership. We present here how we built this amazing data structure using Python tools for cleaning and data processing and a Neo4j graph database storing the network graph itself. In addition, we share the first insights derived from this process.

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IN PURSUIT OF HIDDEN OWNERS:
Shining a light on UK corporate ownership
Adam Hill
with thanks to the team from DataKind UK and Global Witness

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Day Job Charity
Evangelist Me
DataKind volunteer
DataDive volunteer;
Data Ambassador;
Committee member
Find me at
@astroadamh
www.linkedin.com/in/adambenhill/
Horsewithapointyhat.com
Senior Data Scientist
HAL24K delivering
operational and predictive
intelligence to Smart Cities
and Smart enterprises.
Royal Society Entrepreneur in
Residence
Recovering astrophysicist
Adam Hill
Who am I?

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A DataKind DataCorps Project
partnered with Global Witness

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A DataKind DataCorps Project
partnered with Global Witness
• Demonstrate the value and usability of the
beneficial ownership data
• Uncover problems with the data
• Analyse what corporate control looks like in the
UK
• Trial data science methodologies for
investigative journalism
Project Goals

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Data
Techniques Tools
How are we going to do this?
Companies House

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How are we going to do this?

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How are we going to do this?
PLAN

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How are we going to do this?
SPOILER ALERT: REALITY

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How to play with a Neo4j graph database quick sharp!

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Let’s build a graph
http://bit.ly/pyDataLDN-psc-network - NB: It’s not finished yet

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Building what we want
CONSTRAINTS
http://bit.ly/pyDataLDN-psc-network - NB: It’s not finished yet

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Building what we want
START SIMPLE: WHAT ARE THE COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD
http://bit.ly/pyDataLDN-psc-network - NB: It’s not finished yet

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Building what we want
GET COMPLICATED
Lots of detail to be
recorded. Some will be
properties and some will
be relationships

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Building what we want
GET COMPLICATED

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Building what we want
GET COMPLICATED

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IMPACT
What have we accomplished?

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What can we find?
Searching for patterns
For starters we can look up
some of our beloved
pyData colleagues

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What can we find?
Searching for patterns
Implausible dates of birth
4 thousand beneficial owners are listed under the age of 2, including one who has yet to be born. While technically
entrepreneurial toddlers can be listed as beneficial owners, it seems impossible that they could be exercising effective control
over the company right now.

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What did we find
Searching for patterns
Circles of ownership

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What did we find
Searching for patterns

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What did we find
Searching for patterns

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Problems & things to improve
One of the biggest hurdles
we have is the de-duplication
of people.
Could we use a Levenshtein
distance combined with a
graph distance to spot
duplicate people

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Keep an eye out in the Financial Times
on Monday!
Impact: Data Journalism

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Key early findings
Searching for patterns
• 4.1 million companies are now on the beneficial ownership register (3.7 million of these have disclosed at least one
beneficial owner).
• 4 thousand beneficial owners are listed under the age of 2, including one who has yet to be born. While technically
entrepreneurial toddlers can be listed as beneficial owners, it seems impossible that they could be exercising effective
control over the company right now.
• Over 40% of the beneficial owners of Scottish Limited Partnerships (SLPs) are either a national of a former-Soviet
country** or a company incorporated there. This compares to just 0.1% of all Limited Companies (by far the most widely
used UK company type), and provides clear evidence that some types of companies are heavily marketed to citizens of
former Soviet countries.
• 5 beneficial owners control more than 6,000 companies raising the question of whether some of these individuals are
simply stooges put in place by the real owners.
**Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, Ukraine or Uzbekistan

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• Ongoing discussions with Companies House
• Lobbying other governments beyond the UK to adopt open registries
• White paper report
• Investigations into some of the suspicious behaviour
• Always more to be done ……….
https://www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/pursuit-hidden-owners-behind-uk-
companies/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/22/the-sunday-
essay-britain-headquarters-of-fraud
Impact: Lobbying & improvement

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There are no secrets to success. It is the result
of preparation, hard work, and learning from
failure.
— Colin Powell
“

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We are hiring
HAL24K is recruiting for a Junior
DevOps / Data Engineer based at
our Amsterdam office.
HAL24K is a Data Intelligence Lab
delivering operational and
predictive intelligence to Smart
Cities and Smart enterprises; see
www.HAL24K.com
Always looking for volunteer data
scientists for charity projects. Get
in touch
http://www.datakind.org/
chapters/datakind-uk

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THANK YOU
FOR LISTENING
DataKind volunteer
http://datakind.org
@datakinduk
Find me at
@astroadamh
www.linkedin.com/in/adambenhill/
horsewithapointyhat.com
http://bit.ly/pyDataLDN-psc-network
Senior Data Scientist
www.HAL24K.com
Royal Society Entrepreneur in
Residence
Recovering astrophysicist
Adam Hill