AI Summary of Article 31
The Article mandates Member States to apply beneficial ownership transparency regulations to trusts and similar legal arrangements, ensuring trustees maintain up-to-date information on key stakeholders including settlors, trustees, protectors, and beneficiaries.
Member States are required to establish central registers for this information and ensure accessibility to competent authorities, FIUs, and authorised entities. The regulation also incorporates measures for interconnectivity of registers, adherence to data protection rules, and provisions for exemptions in exceptional circumstances to safeguard the sensitive information of beneficial owners.
Article 31
1. Member States shall ensure that this Article applies to trusts and other types of legal arrangements, such as, inter alia, fiducie, certain types of Treuhand or fideicomiso, where such arrangements have a structure or functions similar to trusts. Member States shall identify the characteristics to determine where legal arrangements have a structure or functions similar to trusts with regard to such legal arrangements governed under their law.
Each Member State shall require that trustees of any express trust administered in that Member State obtain and hold adequate, accurate and up-to-date information on beneficial ownership regarding the trust. That information shall include the identity of:
(a) the settlor(s);
(b) the trustee(s);
(c) the protector(s) (if any);
(d) the beneficiaries or class of beneficiaries; and
(e) any other natural person exercising effective control over the trust.
Member States shall ensure that breaches of this Article are subject to effective, proportionate and dissuasive measures or sanctions.