Recital 107

(107) An ownership of 25 % or more of the shares or voting rights or other ownership interest in general establishes the beneficial ownership of a corporate entity. Ownership interest should encompass both control rights and rights that are significant in terms of receiving a benefit, such as a right to a share of profits or other internal resources or liquidation balance. There might, however, be situations where the risk of certain categories of corporate entities being misused for money laundering or terrorist financing purposes is higher, for example due to the specific higher risk sectors in which those corporate entities operate. In such situations, enhanced transparency measures are necessary to dissuade criminals from setting up or infiltrating those entities, either through direct or indirect ownership or control. In order to ensure that the Union is able to adequately mitigate such varying levels of risk, it is necessary to empower the Commission to identify those categories of corporate entities that should be subject to lower beneficial transparency thresholds. To that end, Member States should inform the Commission where they identify categories of corporate entities that are exposed to higher money laundering and terrorist financing risks. In those notifications, it should be possible for Member States to indicate a lower ownership threshold that they consider would mitigate those risks. Such identification should be ongoing and should rely on the results of the risk assessment at Union level and of the national risk assessment as well as on relevant analyses and reports produced by AMLA, Europol or other Union bodies that have a role in the prevention, investigation and prosecution of money laundering and terrorist financing. That lower threshold should be of a sufficiently low level to mitigate the higher risks that corporate entities be misused for criminal purposes. To that end, that lower threshold should in general not be set at more than 15 % of the shares or voting rights or other ownership interest. However, there might be cases in which, on the basis of a risk-sensitive assessment, a higher threshold would be more proportionate to address the identified risks. In those cases, it should be possible for the Commission to set the threshold between 15 % and 25 % of the ownership interest.

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Source: EUR-Lex CELLAR · retrieved 2026-09-04 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.