Want to follow the money? OpenCorporates uses open data to expose corporate structures — Tech News and Analysis

"As any tax fairness campaigner will tell you, there is no better shield against scrutiny than a careful blend of complexity and obscurity. Public filings should in theory take care of the obscurity element, but that leaves complexity – those labyrinthine networks of corporate subsidiaries and holding companies spread around multiple jurisdictions. So, how do we shine a light on these structures and figure out who really controls what? How do we follow that money? That’s where OpenCorporates, a UK startup that blends publicly available data from around the world and presents it in an understandable format, comes in. The company is being incubated in the UK Open Data Institute, and has also received a grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. It’s a similar concept to that of Duedil, a London-based firm that buys, bakes and serves up corporate data so that VCs can do due diligence and businesses can read up on their supplier — only it’s open rather than paid-for, and it has far greater ambitions. Everything OpenCorporates serves up can be consumed for free, unless you’re going to stick it in a proprietary report or database that you don’t intend to give back to the community (OpenCorporates will launch its price list in a week’s time). It has corruption in its sights, and also aims to clean up data for financial regulators and other institutions around the world ..."