who-really-owns-it

Who Really Owns It is an OSINT workflow for researching companies, directors, shareholders, and ultimate beneficial ownership using official corporate registries, filings, and offshore datasets. It names concrete authoritative sources including OpenCorporates, UK Companies House and the PSC register, SEC EDGAR, US Secretary of State registries, EU business registers, GLEIF LEI records, OpenOwnership, OpenSanctions, and the ICIJ Offshore Leaks database. Its central insight is that registry disclosure varies enormously by jurisdiction, so the real strategy is working out what a given jurisdiction lets you see and planning around the gap, and always searching by the durable company number rather than the mutable name.

The method is a structured, read-only research process: resolve the canonical entity, pull the full filing history as a timeline rather than the summary page, read the officer, ownership, and charges records, run officer and address pivots to turn a single entity into a network, screen entity and people against OpenSanctions as review items, and graph multi-entity results. A companion filing-interpretation reference explains how to read formation documents, annual returns and accounts, officer changes, share transfers, charges, and beneficial-ownership declarations, with calibration guidance so an analyst does not, for example, misread the legal norm of absent revenue disclosure in a small company as evasion.

Because it works exclusively with official and public registry sources for defensive due-diligence purposes, it is a benign, read-only research skill. It targets KYB and UBO verification, AML and sanctions screening, nominee and shell-company detection, procurement integrity, and M&A diligence.