In 2018, the RA government initiated a holistic reform process in the field of beneficial ownership (BO) transparency and included a special commitment (№3) in the fourth Action Plan (2018-2020) of the Open Government Partnership initiative of the Government of Armenia. The commitment aimed to implement a common mechanism for identifying the real owners of all sectors of business companies (including non-commercials at the latest stage) through the creation of a comprehensive and freely accessible public register of beneficial ownership. The established public register would help to identify conflicts of interest when an official owns a company, help identify monopoly situations when companies share the same ultimate owner, and ensure proper tax collection by revealing offshore ownership.

For this report, a private sector company is any for-profit legal entity that is not government-owned. This would include limited liability companies, joint stock companies, publicly listed companies, and partnerships, for example. The term company(ies) will be used in the report as shorthand for all such entities. In our understanding, the private sector includes not only companies that produce goods and supply services in all sectors of an economy but also those companies that provide professional services to the private sector including banks, lawyers, and accountants. Taking into consideration the country context and specificality of Armenia, mostly media companies (private ones only) were the main focus of the research team.

Private Sector in the Beneficial Ownership Transparency Reform in Armenia