After 2008, regulators discovered something embarrassing: when a bank collapsed, nobody could say quickly which companies around the world were actually the same company.
So they built an ID. Any business that trades with a bank gets a 20-character code, and the whole list is public and free. There are 3,437,564 of them now.
And each one is asked a second question: who owns you?
748 Filipino Companies Have One
That is the whole list registered to a Philippine address. Small enough to check every single one, which is what I did.
Of those, 192 name an owner. That is 25.7%.
The Other Answer
You are allowed not to name an owner. What you are not allowed to do is stay quiet: you have to file a reason, from a fixed list.
515 companies did that. Only 41 said nothing at all.
So the honest headline is not "Filipino companies hide their owners". The register asked, almost everybody answered, and the answers are mostly not names.
So What Do The Reasons Say?
There are 5 reasons on the list. They fall into three kinds, and the biggest one is the one nobody expects.
There is no owner. Nobody folds this company into their accounts; nobody controls it. 260 companies said that — 50.5% of all the reasons given. That is not a gap in the data. "None" is a complete answer.
The owner is a person. Or a company that never got one of these IDs. 203 companies, or 39.4%. The owner is known. There is just nothing to link to, because people do not get business IDs.
We are not allowed to say. 52 companies, 10.1%. The reason most people assume is the whole story is the smallest of the three.
Where The Real Owners Are
For the 192 that did name an owner, the owner sits in one of 30 countries. 84.4% are abroad, which makes sense — you usually get one of these IDs because a foreign bank or client asked you to.
30 of the owners are Filipino companies themselves: third place, just behind the United States on 41 and Germany. And 34 owners hold more than one Filipino company. The single biggest holds 6, and it is a Filipino group — Aboitiz Equity Ventures Inc..
A Trap I Nearly Walked Into
The register also publishes a list of every change ever made to every record. That is unusually generous — most registers make you download the whole thing twice and compare the two copies yourself.
The list for these companies has 78,818 entries. My first instinct was to call that 78,818 changes.
It is not. 32,582 of those entries — 41.3% — are marked "first load". They are the register writing something down for the first time, not changing it. The real number of changes is 46,236.
One word in one column, and without it every claim about how much these records move would have been wrong by tens of thousands.
And The Changes Are Boring
The single most-changed thing is LastUpdateDate, with
6,496 changes. It is the field that records when the record last
changed. The busiest thing in the history of these companies is the history
noting itself down.
A typical company has 39 changes on record. And 30 have none at all — registered once, and then nothing.
Two Things This Does Not Tell You
It is not "who really benefits". The question the register asks is narrower: whose accounts is this company folded into? A company can honestly answer "nobody" and still have a very definite owner.
These 748 are not Filipino business. They are the Filipino companies that needed an international ID, usually for a foreign counterparty. Everybody else is not in here at all.
How I Got It
Free, no account, no key. But there is no way to ask "give me all the Filipino ownership links" — that query simply does not exist. So it is four questions per company, one company at a time: 3,468 requests, all saved so the numbers stay the same tomorrow.
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