Helicopters, art and yachts: Le Monde’s expose is a key moment in the battle over privacy

The piece, published last week and linked here, is vast in its scope. Beneficiaries span 157 nationalities and the inventory of international assets includes luxury residences, chalets, yachts, helicopters, private jets, music catalogues, works of art. As the paper suggests - “the list is endless”.

The expose is unusual because it isn’t a leak. Luxembourg is one of the first to adhere the 2018 EU Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Directive requiring all Member States to set up and make public a centralised register of ultimate beneficial owners of companies. Luxembourg made its register public in autumn 2019.

“These are documents that have recently been made public, but are only available on the Luxembourg trade register website,” the piece notes. “Le Monde was able to extract them in their entirety for analysis, in partnership with the Suddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, Le Soir in Belgium, McClatchy in the United States, Woxx in Luxembourg, IrpiMedia in Italy, and the OCCRP Consortium of investigative journalists.”

The pace at which information between tax authorities is flowing is growing. In 2020 edition of The Wealth Report we included a five-part investigation on the movements of global wealth documenting the shift towards total transparency led by the US’ FATCA and OECD’s Common Reporting Standards (CRS).

Then in June, the OECD revealed that during 2019 the CRS has led nearly 100 countries to exchange financial information, covering 84 million accounts and US$12 trillion of total assets.

As with any major policy shift, there are trade offs. Concerns over data breaches have been building and Filippo Noseda, partner at Mishcon de Reya and visiting professor at King’s College London, told The Wealth Report that “the transparency laws were born out of a clear need, but have suffered the common fate of executive-branch rule making: they have swung the pendulum too far.”

Last October, Mr Noseda launched an appeal against the public nature of beneficial registers. I reached out to him once more following the Le Monde story to get a better gauge of how significant he thinks it will be. Here’s what he said:

"Some people may applaud the initiative from Le Monde. However, what has been presented as a piece of investigative journalism lifts the lid on the encroachment of the new public registers on the fundamental right to privacy of thousands of family-owned businesses.

"It is interesting that newspapers launched this campaign at a time when the compatibility of public registers of beneficial ownership with fundamental rights has been referred to the Court of Justice of the EU following a number of appeals, including from Mishcon de Reya.

"We have written to the Luxembourg data protection authority (CNPD) with whom we lodged a GDPR complaint on 14 December 2020 asking that the public section of the register be suspended pending the outcome of the case before the European Court of Justice.

"Should the Court of Justice decide that public registers are illegal, the damage to fundamental rights caused by incursions such as the one led by Le Monde will be immense, and irreversible."

We’ll continue to provide updates as the situation develops.