The secret mode opens the way for dark money.

Yulia Wallace is the deputy editor of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Ilya Lozovsky is a senior editor and author for the OCCRP project.

High in the Austrian Alps lies the luxurious Tannenhof hotel. Staying in one of its seven suites, the most expensive of which costs $6,000 per night, is described as "as if your closest billionaire friend decided to create a fabulously luxurious yet personal alpine retreat."

However, until last summer, there was no way to prove that this exclusive resort was linked to VTB Bank - the state-owned Russian bank often referred to as President Vladimir Putin's "piggy bank." After months of pressure from the European Union and advocates for corporate transparency, Cyprus finally made its corporate ownership registry public in June, allowing us at the OCCRP project to reveal that half of the hotel’s shares belong to a Canadian who has apparently been the "face" of VTB Chairman Andrey Kostin, an oligarch loyal to Putin, for many years.

This case illustrates how important it is for the public to have access to information about who is really behind corporate structures, and to what extent Russians went to hide their connection to the hotel. VTB, which previously openly owned the hotel, was sanctioned by the US and EU in 2014. Later, ownership of its Cypriot holding company was transferred to another Cypriot firm, whose owners were concealed behind corporate nominees - individuals whose role is to act on behalf of the actual owners.

Even when Austria opened its corporate registry in 2018, the hotel was still able to take advantage of a loophole: since its ownership was evenly distributed between two ultimate shareholders, it was considered that it had no beneficial owner, which hindered journalists from determining who was behind it. And, of course, the country deprived the public of access to its registry of beneficial owners shortly after the ECtHR's decision.

But this case is just one of many. Take Serbia, for example, where journalists have long been following the career of Nikola Petrović, the president's best friend. Until our colleague Dragana Pećo gained access to the new register of beneficial owners in Luxembourg, they had no idea that Petrović was using a Luxembourg company to invest in several major Serbian enterprises, as well as that he had secret business ties with a well-known businessman linked to organized crime.

The article written by Pecho about Petrovich may not have become international news, but it made headlines in Serbia, where the government is seriously compromised by ties to criminal groups. "If this information hadn't been in the Luxembourg register of beneficial owners, the public would have never known about it," she told us.

This is why the gradual opening of beneficial ownership registries since 2019 has been a real salvation. "It felt like a turning point in our work," says Maire Martini from Transparency International. "Activists and journalists who have faced a deadlock for years in trying to establish a connection between suspicious assets and their real owners can finally start piecing together the puzzle."

And these puzzles lead journalists to grim places.

Massive data leaks, such as the "Panama Papers" and the "Pandora Papers," were needed to reveal who owns what. When the Maltese register of beneficial owners was finally launched in 2020, the true owner of the proxy firm became almost instantly visible. It turned out to be Laszlo Si, a wealthy construction magnate who made his fortune on government contracts in Hungary.

Something similar happened in Lebanon, where OCCRP tried to confirm long-standing rumors that the head of the central bank has a huge hidden fortune abroad and in various European countries. Only after the beneficial ownership register was established in Luxembourg were we able to see that the central bank head is a "beneficial owner" of three companies that owned nearly 100 million dollars in real estate in Germany, Belgium, and the UK - most of which was frozen by European authorities following our investigations.

But now all these achievements are under threat. Although the European ruling states that journalists should be granted access to company registers in certain cases, it is unclear what this might mean in practice - and the requirements will surely be more burdensome. Denying the public the right to know who is buying the most expensive real estate in their countries or taking yacht cruises with politicians is neither wise nor moral. And in the absence of random leaks of internal documents, it will now be impossible to identify the next Tannenhof hotel.