A two-day regional workshop brought together anti-money laundering practitioners from Eastern Partnership countries to accelerate reforms that make beneficial ownership information accurate, usable and shared across borders. Practitioners responsible for detecting and disrupting illicit finance: financial intelligence units, tax authorities, prosecution services and officers responsible for beneficial ownership registries from Eastern Partnership countries, including Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine contributed to the event.
The workshop responded directly to recent global and European policy shifts that raise the bar for how countries collect, verify and use information about who ultimately owns or controls companies and other legal arrangements. In particular, the event focused on turning policy requirements into operational improvements and regional cooperation.
Benefiting from the workshop, the participants got equipped with a clearer, practical roadmap for improving the reliability and usability of beneficial ownership information at the national level. Stronger verification, meaningful sanctions for non-compliance and false reporting, better use of beneficial ownership data in investigations, and interoperable information systems between countries is expected to further reduce the ability of criminals and corrupt actors to hide behind opaque company structures.
By combining policy dialogue, peer learning and technical exchange, the workshop contributed to moving beneficial ownership transparency in the Eastern Partnership from a collection of isolated efforts toward coherent, interoperable systems that can detect and prevent misuse of corporate structures across jurisdictions.
This event is part of the European Union and the Council of Europe joint programme “Partnership for Good Governance”, co-funded by the European Union and the Council of Europe, and implemented by the Council of Europe, in the framework of the regional project on “Strengthening measures to prevent and combat economic crime in the Eastern Partnership region”.
