Introducing CorporateGroupings: where fuzzy concepts meet legal entities
From the webpage:
One of the key issues when you’re looking at any big company is what are the constituent parts – because these days a company of any size is pretty much never a single legal entity, but a web of companies, often spanning multiple jurisdictions.
Sometimes this is done because the company’s operations are in different territories, sometimes because the company is a conglomerate of different companies – an educational book publisher and a financial newspaper, for example. Sometimes it’s done to limit the company’s tax liability, or for other legal reasons (e.g. to benefit from a jurisdiction’s rules & regulations compared with the ‘parent’ company’s jurisdiction).
Whatever the reason, getting a handle on the constituent parts is pretty tricky, whether you’re a journalist, a campaigner, a government tax official or a competitor, and making it public is trickier still, meaning the same research is duplicated again and again. And while we may all want to ultimately surface in detail the complex cross-holdings of shareholdings between the different companies, that goal is some way off, not least because it’s not always possible to discover the shareholders of a company.
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So you must make do with reading annual reports and trawling company registries around the world, and hoping you don’t miss any. We like to think OpenCorporates has already made this quite a bit easier, meaning that a single search for Tesco returns hundreds of results from around the world, not just those in the UK, or some other individual jurisdiction. But what about where the companies don’t include the group in the name, and how do you surface the information you’ve found for the rest of the world?
The solution to both, we think, is Corporate Groupings, a way of describing a grouping of companies without having to say exactly what legal form that relationship takes (it may be a subsidiary of a subsidiary, for example). In short, it’s what most humans (i.e. non tax-lawyers) think of when they think of a large company – whether it’s a HSBC, Halliburton or HP.
This could have legs.
Not to mention what is a separate subject to you (subsidiary) may be encompassed by a larger subject to me. Both are valid from a certain point of view.