Laundering lobby wins in Malta and Czech Republic

The perhaps most financially powerful lobby in the world – an unholy alliance of Russian oligarchs, South American drug lords, and tax evaders from around the globe – is successfully continuing its tactic of chipping away, bit by bit, at public access to company registers. The latest casualty is the ESM – the Czech register for Beneficial Owners, the directory of individuals who ultimately control companies. According to the website of the register, the Czech Ministry of Justice has announced that public access was shut down on December 17, 2025. Since then only so-called privileged users, such as authorities, have access. It was only in July that access to Malta’s company register was similarly restricted.

These closures are justified by invoking the catch-all argument of “data protection.” However, the idea of data protection is to safeguard sensitive personal information – not to enable anonymous activity under the cover of a corporate shell. So far, the greatest success for the money laundering lobby was the erroneous ruling by the European Court of Justice in 2022, which restricted access to transparency registers. Since then, numerous countries have relied on this judgment to close their registers to the public once more. The plaintiff before the ECJ was a business partner of Russian oligarchs.