Ukraine’s Parliament obliges media to disclose their beneficial owners

The MPs have adopted the law which obliges to disclose the ultimate beneficial owners of Ukrainian media.

The bill was supported by 237 MPs, the Ukrayinska Pravda Ukrainian media outlet reports.

“This refers to the transparency in media. The bill was passed for Ukraine to know the whole chain of owners and beneficiaries of the media, including electronic media,” chairperson of the Parliament’s Committee on Freedom of Speech and Information Policy Viktoria Siumar says.

The law stipulates that legal entities and individual entrepreneurs registered in offshore zones and residents of the aggressor state or the occupier state are banned from founding, participating in TV and radio broadcasting organizations and program services providers.

The law obliges the radio and television broadcasting company to publish the information about the structure of ownership on its official website and submit this information to the National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine.

As the explanatory note to the bill states, Ukraine now lacks any reliable information about the owners of the Ukrainian media.

“This law will make activities of Ukrainian broadcasting organizations and program services providers more transparent, provide additional guarantees of freedom of speech, and create conditions for transparent licensing of radio and television broadcasting,” reads the Committee’s conclusion.

The authors of the law are MP Mykola Kniazhytsky (the People’s Front Party) and MP Vadym Denysenko (the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko).