Up to recently the online registry also allowed members of the public to find out who the ultimate beneficial owner of an Irish company was in return for registering and paying a fee of €2.50. The Irish Times used the register earlier this year to show that an Irish company called Holytown Ltd, with an address in Sandyford, Dublin, was owned by the daughter and stepdaughter of a sanctioned Russian businessman and former KGB general, Sergey Chemezov.
The directives granted access to the registries to those who had a “legitimate interest” in the information. The court has ruled that the difficulty in defining what would constitute a legitimate reason for a member of the public to have access to the register was not a sufficient reason for the EU to decide to allow public access generally. The implications of the ruling are being examined by the commission and authorities around the union.
Dublin lawyer Paul Egan, who chairs the Irish Company Law Review Group, tweeted in response to the ruling that “trading anonymously, with limited liability, cannot be a human right. There is a legitimate public interest in the publication of the identity of controllers of a limited company, who will escape personal liability if and whenever that limited liability company becomes insolvent.”