Malta widens access to beneficial ownership register

The 2026 Amending Regulations under Malta’s Trusts and Trustees Act entered into force on 22 September 2026, the MFSA said, widening access to the Trusts and Trustees Act Register of Beneficial Owners (TUBOR) and formalising routes for legitimate-interest requests.

The practical decision for an applicant is now whether it can prove an entitled status or must substantiate a legitimate interest. The notice describes access for specified authorities and obliged entities, alongside categories of persons treated as having a deemed legitimate interest.

Verified status governs obliged-entity access

Authorities investigating or prosecuting money laundering, predicate offences or terrorist financing, or tracing, freezing or confiscating criminal assets, receive "immediate, unfiltered, direct, and free access" to information held in interconnected central registers. The MFSA said this access already applied to national authorities and now clearly extends to EU member-state authorities, including financial intelligence analysis units and police forces, and to supranational bodies such as the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, Europol, Eurojust and the European Anti-Fraud Office through BORIS.

The amendments also provide TUBOR access to obliged entities for customer due diligence. They introduce a definition of ‘obliged entities’ aligned with relevant references in the EU anti-money-laundering framework and replace the term ‘subject person’ used in Malta’s Prevention of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism Regulations.

The MFSA’s procedural emphasis is verification. Applicants that demonstrate they qualify as obliged entities under the law will be recognised on that basis and granted access. The notice describes this as a more streamlined process, but it does not remove the need to evidence the status supporting the application.

That creates a specific control requirement: the access file should show why the applicant qualifies, what evidence established that qualification and when the status was verified. Access to TUBOR is a permission to obtain information for customer due diligence. It is not, by itself, a conclusion about the ownership or control of the customer under review.

Legitimate interest has two routes

Regulation 6 identifies categories of persons deemed to have a legitimate interest. The MFSA lists journalists, civil society organisations, persons likely to enter into a business relationship with a trust, third-country AML/CFT competent authorities, EU member-state programme authorities responsible for EU funds and certain public authorities, among others.

A separate route remains available to any person who can demonstrate a legitimate interest in preventing and combating money laundering, predicate offences or terrorist financing. The MFSA said those applications will continue to be assessed case by case and must be supported by necessary evidence and documentation.

The distinction is operational. An applicant in a deemed category must establish the relevant category. Any other applicant must build an evidential record for the interest claimed. The notice does not say that a commercial or investigative assertion alone secures access, and it does not convert TUBOR into an unrestricted public search facility.

The accessible information can include a beneficial owner’s name and surname, month and date of birth, nationality or nationalities, country of residence and the nature of the beneficial interest. Certain categories may also obtain historical information, including information on trusts that ceased to exist during the preceding five years, together with a description of the ownership or control structure.

The next test is documentary discipline

The amendments change the access mechanism, not the evidential burden attached to using information responsibly. Firms and other applicants should separate proof of eligibility, proof of legitimate interest and the material obtained from TUBOR in their records.

A review file should therefore identify the access route, retain the supporting documentation and record how retrieved information was assessed alongside the applicant’s wider ownership and control evidence. That is an analytical consequence of the MFSA’s verification and documentation requirements, not a new procedure expressly announced as a forthcoming supervisory exercise.

The MFSA notice identifies no forthcoming examination, enforcement action or guidance exercise. The next observable supervisory test is therefore unresolved: it will be whether a later examination, enforcement decision or guidance document tests the quality of applicants’ evidence, classification and recordkeeping under the new routes. Until that signal appears, the source-backed implementation task is to align access files with the regulations in force from 22 September 2026.