The Corporate Affairs Commission has called for the harmonisation and centralisation of Nigeria’s beneficial ownership information to strengthen the fight against corruption, money laundering and illicit financial flows.
The Registrar-General and Chief Executive Officer of the CAC, Hussaini Magaji, made the call on Tuesday at a training on the beneficial ownership register organised for journalists and civil society organisations.
Beneficial ownership information identifies the natural persons who ultimately own, control or benefit from companies and other corporate structures.
Magaji said Nigeria currently operates three separate beneficial ownership transparency registers under different institutional frameworks.
They include the beneficial ownership register maintained by the CAC; information on entities operating within free trade zones under the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority; and beneficial ownership information on entities in the extractive industries maintained under the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative framework.
According to the CAC boss, while the three registers have legitimate statutory purposes, they largely collect similar information about companies and their owners.
He said the systems were designed to establish who owns an entity, who controls it, who benefits from it and the natural person behind a corporate structure.
Magaji said the country needed a coordinated national framework to prevent beneficial ownership information from being fragmented across different institutions.
“My position is clear: Nigeria should work towards harmonising and centralising beneficial ownership information within a coordinated national framework, with the CAC corporate registry serving as the central corporate data backbone,” he said.
The Registrar-General stressed that the proposal would not undermine the statutory responsibilities of NEPZA and NEITI but would enable information held by the various institutions to be connected and accessed more effectively.
He said fragmented information could make it difficult for regulators, investigators and other authorised users to obtain a complete picture of a company’s ownership, particularly when a business operates across different sectors and regulatory environments.
“If the objective is transparency and accountability, then information should not exist in silos. We must make it possible to see the complete picture,” Magaji said.
He urged journalists and civil society organisations to scrutinise the issue and advocate interoperability, common standards and the elimination of duplication among the different beneficial ownership registers.
Magaji also called for greater accessibility to beneficial ownership information, while stressing the need to comply with privacy and data protection requirements.
The CAC said stronger coordination of beneficial ownership information would improve corporate transparency and support efforts to combat money laundering, terrorism financing, illicit financial flows and the abuse of corporate structures.
The commission maintained that a more integrated system would also enhance the ability of relevant authorities and stakeholders to identify the individuals ultimately behind corporate entities and transactions.
