In April 2016 the UK government introduced a law that requires all companies incorporated in the UK to disclose any people with significant control (PSCs).

This rule requires that anyone who holds (directly or indirectly) more than 25% of the shares of a company must register this on companies house. This is very useful for finding the largest owners / shareholders of a company.

The significant controller doesn't have to be a person, it could be another company, a trust or a group of people acting in concert.

Often there are multiple layers of ownership for a private company, particularly when it is receiving investments from institutional investors. In these scenarios you often see bidco, midco and topco in the names of the companies to denote the different layers.

You can use companies house to trace up the ownership “tree” to find the ultimate beneficial owners of a company. This can be a bit tedious as you have to manually look up and search each one.

Why not let findashareholder.co.uk do this work for you? We automatically analyse and trace the beneficial owners so you don't have to.

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