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Control
Who ultimately controls whom — every asset traced up to a beneficial owner, every owner down to a jurisdiction.
Follow any asset up the chain of who-holds-whom and it terminates in a person or a state; the chain is the map of real power.
The live graph
Search any company and walk its real ownership — up to the ultimate parent, down to its subsidiaries, with the institutions that hold its stock. 3.4M companies, live from the graph.
First principles
Ownership is control exercised at a distance — to own is to command without touching.
Every asset resolves to a beneficial owner. The chain may be long and deliberately opaque, but it terminates.
Control concentrates. Left alone, ownership graphs collapse toward a handful of ultimate holders.
The legal wrapper is not the owner. A name on a title deed is a layer, not an answer.
The layers
Companies & Ownership decomposed from surface to foundation. Each layer rests on the one beneath it, and control of a lower layer reaches every layer above.
The library
The systems in this domain, explained in full — each with every type described.
The legal machines that hold, transmit and hide control — from the plain subsidiary to the ownerless foundation.
Explore Ownership VehiclesOwnership is a contest between the techniques that hide it and the regimes that force it into the light.
Explore Concealment & DisclosureThe practical craft of walking an ownership chain from an asset up to the person or state at the top.
Explore Tracing MethodsKey concepts
The natural person or state who ultimately benefits from and controls an asset, however many legal wrappers sit in between.
The top entity that consolidates a group and answers to no higher owner in the chain.
A holding entity whose only function is to hold another entity — the material of deliberate opacity.
Voting control and economic benefit can be split; dual-class shares and pyramids let a small stake command a large asset.
Where value is captured along the chain
The same asset, read at each layer — and who takes the margin there.
| Layer | Captures | Typical opacity |
|---|---|---|
| Operator | Wages, local taxes | Low — licences are public |
| Subsidiary | Transfer-pricing margin | High — stacked, cross-border |
| Parent | Consolidated profit | Low — listed & filed |
| Beneficial owner | Dividends, capital gains | Medium — disclosure gaps |
Findings, with confidence
Every claim carries its confidence — fact, inference, or projection — and the reasoning behind it. Nothing here is asserted beyond what the evidence supports.
The DRC produces roughly 70% of the world’s mined cobalt.
basis · USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries — authoritative, deductive.
Most large mines route ownership through at least one secrecy-jurisdiction holding entity.
basis · Corporate-registry pattern across the graph; inductive.
Concentration of a commodity’s mines under one parent predicts pricing power.
basis · Analogy to observed chokepoints; not yet causally tested.
Going deeper
Take a copper–cobalt deposit in the DRC. On the ground it is run by a local operator holding the mining licence; that operator is held by a subsidiary, which rolls up into a listed parent headquartered in a low-tax European jurisdiction and incorporated in an offshore one; the parent’s shares sit with institutional and insider owners. Six layers, one real chain — and only by walking all six do you get from the hole in the ground to the people who actually benefit.
Opacity is manufactured at the subsidiary layer. Holding companies are stacked several deep and routed through secrecy-friendly registries; nominee directors stand in for real owners; and beneficial stakes are split to sit just under the ~25% disclosure threshold most regimes use. The point is not complexity for its own sake — each ring is a place where the visible chain can be broken.
Voting control and economic benefit can be separated. Dual-class shares, ownership pyramids and cross-holdings let a small economic stake command a large asset — a founder with 5% of the cash flow can hold 50% of the votes. To read real power, follow the votes; to read who profits, follow the dividends. They are not always the same person.
Public filings (SEC, GLEIF) and operator registries (MSHA) make listed and regulated ownership highly traceable — confidence on the parent is high. Private, offshore and informal ownership is thin, so confidence on the ultimate beneficial owner is lower and honestly labelled. Where the chain goes dark, we mark the gap rather than guess.
Data provenance
This page is a view over the same intelligence graph the rest of Tricellix runs on. Where the graph is thin, we say so; the live interactive view mounts here as each source is wired in.
Take this system from reference to decision.