Nearly 90 percent of the oil and gas industry in Albania is owned by companies that are registered in tax havens.
Among them is Bankers, the largest company in the country that owns nearly 80% of the oil that is extracted in the country, including the Pato marine oil field, the largest in Europe.
From a search carried out by the Center for Transparency and Free Information (qTIL) in the register of beneficial owners set up by the National Business Center, it results that out of 6 companies with the obligation to declare beneficial owners, 3 of them are registered in tax havens .
Bankers Petroleum has indirect ownership registered in tax havens in the Cayman Islands. Its owners are 7 beneficial owners of Sherood International Petroleum Ltd, while it is managed by a Chinese citizen.
The company Anio Oil&Gas Sha (formerly Trans Atlantik Albania Ltd) has direct ownership, but it is also registered in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands (GBC Oil Company LTD).
Another company in the field of oil and gas extraction, Delvina Gas Company presents indirect ownership as it is registered in the British virgin islands tax haven.
Meanwhile, Transoil Group AG (IEC Visoka Shp) represents indirect ownership but is not registered in tax havens. This company is registered in Switzerland.
Fin Pek Petroleum represents indirect ownership and is registered in Albania.
The oil and gas exploration company operating in the country, Shell upstream is indirectly owned and registered in the Netherlands.
Ownership:
Unlike other companies in the field of extractive industry for some oil companies there is no data in figures regarding the beneficial owners. For Bankers there is no figure regarding the beneficial owners of this company which is administered by Chinese. Each of the 7 registration numbers is not accompanied by a percentage value. This situation can be created only when each of them has less than 25% participation. It can be seen how ironic this threshold is in the case of oil companies with a large weight in the Albanian economy such as Bankers.
The company has only declared its administrator or top executive without reviewing while the public cannot see about the distribution of the company's ownership to the company and other shareholders.
Regarding Transatlantic Albania, it seems a little strange why this company represents direct ownership as long as the Albanian company is a representative of a company registered in fiscal havens. According to the Certificate of Incorporation, dated 11.06.2007, submitted to the CKB, Transatlantik Albania (Former Stream Oil & Gas Ltd) is a limited liability company, exempt from taxes, established in the Cayman Islands as a limited liability company, since 11.06.2007, reports Open Corporates Albania.
Delvina Gas Company has Albanian ownership even though it is registered in tax havens. 90% of the beneficial owner is known while 10% is not known, however it does not constitute a violation. The Law on the Register of Beneficial Owners provides for the declaration of ownership when it is 25% or more.
Delvina Gas Company Ltd is a limited liability company established in 2016 and operating under the laws of the British Virgin Islands.
Transoil Group presents mixed ownership between Albanian and foreign in the ratio of 31% to 31%, while the rest is covered by nearly 470 small partners according to the register of beneficial owners at the CKB crossed with the data of the company register at this institution.
While Fin Pek Petroleum is the company with the most understandable extract in relation to the others, despite the fact that all extracts of the beneficial owners are quite opaque for people who are not well accommodated with reading these forms.
The ownership in this case is 40% for an individual owner and the rest for the company that is 100% owned by this individual. What stands out are the large number of transactions developed from 2012-2015 (10 transactions in total) and 2021 (2 transactions) to reach the current ownership view.
Of the oil companies that operate in the sector of its extraction and sale, Alpetrol does not make a declaration of ownership because its ownership is state-owned
Oil and gas exploration company Shell Upstream is registered in the Netherlands. It is very difficult to reach the individual beneficial owner as there are only zeros on the forms, just like in the case of Bankers.
Shell Upstream Albania BV is a company founded in 2011 and owned by the financial group Royal Dutch Shell, which partially or fully owns 159 other companies registered in the commercial register of the Netherlands.
It is noticeable that the registration of the beneficiaries of ownership in the oil industry has not been done according to the requirements of the law or that the data that may have been declared by the companies are not accurate.
published in the abstracts. Reading the extracts, it is not understood in 4 cases who is the owner of the oil companies in Albania, since there is no figure in the published extract.
The form does not show the percentage of ownership even in those cases where the name of the individual beneficial owner is highlighted, such as the case of Transtlantik Albania, where the name of the owner is highlighted but there is no data on the percentage of ownership.
In one case of direct ownership, the owner is not recognized for 10% (it is legal), in another the owner is not recognized for 37.2%, in another the percentage of the individual but also of the legal entity is not recognized (Shell upstream is represented); two companies do not have data on the percentage of ownership (Bankers and Anio oil & gas sha), despite the fact that it is considered that the company has registered the ownership and it has been approved by the KKB.
But despite the problems encountered by reviewing the published extracts, out of 6 companies, 5 of them immediately received the approval of the declaration of beneficial owners, 1 company was rejected twice, the third time the application was accepted.
Based on the findings of a monitoring regarding the implementation of the law on the Register of Beneficial Owners conducted by the Center for Transparency and Free Information, it proposes to lower the threshold for the extractive industry, i.e. also for the oil industry, from 25% to 10% .
But experts of this project are even more radical in their demands for lowering the threshold. Anila Hajnaj, legal expert in this project, says that even 1% in an oil company is too much. "I would request that the beneficial owner declaration limit for the oil industry be 1%," she says.
Meanwhile, an expertise prepared by the Center for Transparency and Free Information (qTIL) proposes that the threshold be lowered to 10% for the entire extractive industry and 1% when it comes to Politically Exposed Persons (PEP). A. Bega (edited by S. Nezaj)
"This publication was made possible with the financial support of AMSHC. Its content is the responsibility of the author, the opinion expressed in it is not necessarily the opinion of AMSHC"
