The decision on the admissibility of secrecy opens the floodgates for dark money..

Julia Wallace is deputy editor-in-chief of the Organized Crime and Corruption Control Project (OCCRP). Ilya Lozovsky is senior editor and author of the OCCRP.

High in the Austrian Alps lies the luxurious Hotel Tannenhof.

A stay in one of its seven suites, the most expensive of which costs $6,000 a night, is described as "if your closest billionaire friend decided to create a fabulously luxurious yet cozy Alpine resort." Until last summer, however, there was no way to prove that this exclusive resort was linked to VTB, the state-owned Russian bank that has been described as President Vladimir Putin's "piggy bank." After years of pressure from the European Union and advocates of corporate transparency, Cyprus finally made its corporate ownership registry publicly available in June, allowing us at the Organization for the Control of Organized Crime and Corruption (OCCRP) to reveal that half of the hotel's shares are owned by a Canadian who has apparently been fronting for VTB chairman Andrei Kostin, an oligarch loyal to Putin, for years.

You may be interested As Russian missiles darken Ukrainian cities, such cases offer a timely illustration of a different kind of battle. They show how secret corporate structures are routinely used to cloak the ownership of lucrative assets in the hearts of Western democracies, and how corporate transparency - in this case, access to records revealing the "ultimate beneficial owners" (UBOs) of a Cypriot shell firm - allows journalists, activists, and investigators to uncover them. At least until recently.

If the opening of the Cyprus registry represented a clear victory for transparency advocates, they have since suffered a bitter defeat. After a high-powered London law firm filed a lawsuit on behalf of an anonymous client in Luxembourg, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) overturned a 2015 anti-money laundering regulation that required all European countries to create publicly available databases of the real owners of companies - so-called "beneficial ownership registers." But the case of the Tannenhof Hotel shows how important it is for the public to have access to information about who is really behind corporate structures, and how far the Russians went to disguise their connection to the hotel.

VTB, which once openly owned the hotel, was sanctioned by the United States and the European Union in 2014. Ownership of its Cypriot holding company was then transferred to another Cypriot firm whose owners hid behind corporate nominee shareholders - people whose job it is to act on behalf of the real owners. Even after Austria opened its corporate registry in 2018, the hotel was still able to exploit a loophole: because its ownership was split evenly between the two ultimate shareholders, it was deemed to have no beneficial owner, preventing journalists from finding out who was behind it. And, of course, the country closed access to its UBO register just days after the CJEU's decision.

But this case is just one of many. Take Serbia, for example, where journalists have long followed the career of Nikola Petrovic, the president's best friend. Until our colleague Dragana Petzo managed to gain access to Luxembourg's new UBO registry, they never knew that Petrovic had used a shell Luxembourg company to invest in several large Serbian businesses, and that he had secret ties to a prominent businessman with ties to organized crime. The article written by Peco about Petrovic may not have made global news, but it made headlines in Serbia, where the government has been seriously undermined by ties to criminal groups. "If Luxembourg's UBO registry didn't exist, the public would never know about it," Peco told us.

Until last summer, there was no way to prove that this exclusive resort was connected to VTB, the state-owned Russian bank that has been called President Vladimir Putin's piggy bank | Kirlll Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images

That's why the gradual opening of UBO registries from 2019 was a real lifesaver.

In Hungary, our partners at Atlatszo publication tried for years to find out who owns Lady Mrd, a €21 million luxury yacht on which they spotted several high-ranking Hungarian government officials. Although they eventually managed to find out that the yacht belonged to a Maltese shell company, they then ran into an obstacle: the company was not connected to the man. It was registered by another company acting as an intermediary, PKF Fiduciaries International Ltd. Hungarian journalists could see that PKF also owned some 200 other companies, indicating that it had been hired by the ship's true owners to hide their interest, but they could do nothing - a common situation in European secrecy jurisdictions such as Malta, Cyprus and Luxembourg before the obligation to create registries was introduced.

Massive data leaks such as the Panama Papers and Pandorina Papers have revealed who owns which assets. However, when Malta's UBO registry finally went live in 2020, the true owner of the shell company became known almost instantly. It turned out to be Laszlo Siy, a wealthy construction tycoon who made his fortune from Hungarian government contracts.

Something similar happened in Lebanon, where the OCCRP tried to confirm long-standing rumors that the central bank governor had a huge fortune that he was hiding abroad and in various European countries. It was only after the launch of the Luxembourg registry that we were able to see that the bank governor was the "beneficial owner" of three companies that owned nearly $100 million of real estate in Germany, Belgium and the UK - most of which was frozen by European authorities after our investigations.

But now all this work is under threat. Although the European decision states that journalists should have access to corporate registers in certain cases, it is unclear what this might mean in practice - and the requirements will be much more burdensome. Denying the public the right to know who is buying the most expensive real estate in their countries or arranging yacht outings for their politicians is neither reasonable nor moral. And in the absence of random leaks of internal documents, it will now be impossible to track the next Hotel Tannenhof.