Partner Filippo Noseda has been interviewed by the Luxembourg magazine Paperjam on his appeal against the public nature of beneficial registers.
He also commented the news published on 8 February 2021 by French newspaper Le Monde announcing that an international consortium of newspapers had sifted through the Luxembourg register of beneficial ownership and put together a huge database containing a list of the 64,458 beneficiaries of the 124,000 commercial companies registered in Luxembourg "along with 3.3 million administrative and financial reports".
Filippo commented: "Some people may applaud the initiative from Le Monde. However, what has been presented as a piece of investigative journalism lifts the lid on the encroachment of the new public registers on the fundamental right to privacy of thousands of family-owned businesses.
"It is extraordinary interesting that newspapers launched this campaign at a time when the compatibility of public registers of beneficial ownership with fundamental rights has been referred to the Court of Justice of the EU following a number of appeals, including from Mishcon de Reya.
"We have written to the Luxembourg data protection authority (CNPD) with whom we lodged a GDPR complaint on 14 December 2020 asking that the public section of the register be suspended pending the outcome of the case before the European Court of Justice.
"Should the Court of Justice decide that public registers are illegal, the damage to fundamental rights caused by incursions such as the one led by Le Monde will be immense, and irreversible."
Click here to read the letter to the National Data Protection Commission (CNPD).
Here you can read the full article (in French).