Recital 134

(134) In order to encourage compliance and ensure an effective beneficial ownership transparency, beneficial ownership requirements need to be enforced. To that end, Member States should apply penalties for breaches of those requirements. Those penalties should be effective, proportionate and dissuasive, and should not go beyond what is required to encourage compliance. Penalties introduced by Member States should have an equivalent deterrent effect across the Union on the breaches of beneficial ownership requirements. It should be possible for penalties to include, for example, fines for legal entities and on trustees or persons holding an equivalent position in a similar legal arrangement imposed for failure to hold accurate, adequate or up-to-date beneficial ownership information, the striking-off of legal entities that fail to comply with the obligation to hold beneficial ownership information or to submit beneficial ownership information within a given deadline, fines for beneficial owners and other persons who fail to cooperate with a legal entity or trustee of an express trust or person holding an equivalent position in a similar legal arrangement, fines for nominee shareholders and nominee directors who fail to comply with the obligation of disclosure, or private law consequences for undisclosed beneficial owners as prohibition of the payment of profits or prohibition of the exercise of voting rights.

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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.