Register of beneficial owners ends up on a dead end

The Register of beneficial owners of Italy - the last country of the 27 to adopt, in September last year, the anti-money laundering list envisaged by the EU directives - ends up definitively in limbo. The communication with which yesterday evening, 6 December, the Court of Justice of Luxembourg notified the numerous parties of the 'rejection of the request for accelerated processing in joined preliminary ruling cases C-684/24 and C-685/24' actually says much more than its strictly technical content.

The timing of the judicial dispute, which began in the aftermath of the Dm making the Registry operative, is definitively taking a long course: by 16 February 2025, the many counter-interested parties (States, Commission, EU Parliament, Council and ECB) will be able to submit to the Court pleadings or written observations on the request for a preliminary ruling: from there, the proceedings will take root and in the canonical 16-18 months they could reach a ruling, which would then lead to the resumption of the 'guided' dispute before the Italian Council of State.

Considering that with the VI directive, which will enter into force definitively in 2027, the rules of the European Registry will also change, it is not far-fetched to claim that the obstacle race of the Italian Registry ends here, in the aftermath of, among other things, the decision of Unioncamere to suspend reporting obligations.

At the centre of the numerous appeals that have rained down before the Council of State, which on 15 October referred the question to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling, is the controversy linked to the privacy of persons (just under 2 million), destined to complete the Register in spite of themselves: owners of companies with legal personality, of private legal persons, of trusts producing legal effects relevant for tax purposes and of legal institutions similar to trusts; of joint-stock companies, limited liability companies, simplified limited liability companies, limited partnerships with share capital, cooperative societies, consortium companies with share capital, limited partnerships with share capital or limited liability.

The register designed by the EU rules, and transposed in the anti-money laundering decree 231/2007, can in fact be consulted by any natural or legal person motivated by a generic 'legitimate interest'. If transparency of this depth is a pillar of the fight against the black economy and money laundering, the counterpart is, in fact, also open to less than legitimate curiosity. Thousands of institutions with sensitive data on individuals, families, subjects that are protected or to be protected - even from the perspective of terrorist or criminal threats.