The general public’s access to information on the beneficial owners of private businesses, as established in the EU’s anti-money-laundering directive, is null and void. This was decided by the European Court of Justice on Tuesday. The Court justifies its ruling by stating that anyone being able to look up the identity of a company’s final beneficiary would constitute a serious interference with the affected individual’s right to privacy. Concerning the directive’s purpose of combating money laundering and terrorist financing, the Court believes that public access to information on beneficial owners does not contribute to accomplishing this goal.
It remains to be seen what this means for Luxembourg’s Beneficial Owners Register (RBE). On Tuesday evening, the Ministry of Justice announced in a press release that public internet access to the register will be suspended until further notice. The Ministry added that it is currently working on a solution to ensure that those who need to access data saved in the RBE for professional purposes can continue to do so.
Upon enquiry by our colleagues from RTL.lu, the Ministry of Justice stated that it needs to carefully review the ruling of the European judges first. The Ministry noted that the ECJ judgement affected the EU directive rather than its application in Luxembourgish law, but then again the Luxembourgish law is, of course, in accordance with the European directive. However, it is clear that Luxembourg will abide by the decision of the European Court of Justice, with the issue affecting all EU member states that have implemented the directive, the ministry said.
The decision by the European Court of Justice is on the agenda of the Parliamentary Judicial Committee on Wednesday morning. MP Laurent Mosar from the Christian Social People’s Party (CSV) also submitted an urgent parliamentary question, enquiring whether the government intends to amend the law on the Beneficial Owners Register.
