Tag Archive for 'Company Research'

Belize Corporate Filings

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 19, 2010
in Company Research and Sources
. 2 Comments

Here is my advice on researching Belize corporations.

International Business Company (IBC)

First, check the IBC struck-off list at:

http://www.ibcbelize.com/

The International Business Companies Registry is located in the Marina Towers building in Belize City. A competent  & experienced staff is available to help you.

Marina Towers, Suite 201
Newtown Barracks
Belize City, Belize
Central America

Telephone numbers: 501-223-5108 / 223-5120 / 224-4701
Fax number: 501-223-5124
E-mail address: ibc@btl.net
Contact Person: Ms. Katherine Haylock, Deputy Registrar

Other Company Types

Normally you must travel to Belmopan, the capital, to visit the Companies’ Registry and request a computerized name search of all existing Belizean company names, which takes a few minutes to complete. however, a request can also be done by telephone or fax at a fee of BZE 50

The contact information is as follows:

Belize Companies and Corporate Affairs Registry
Ground Floor Garden City Hotel
Mountain View Boulevard
Belmopan City, Cayo District
Belize Central America

TEL: 822- 0421/ 822-0531
FAX: 822- 0422
http://www.belizecompaniesregistry.gov.bz/

Belizean laws allow for the following categories of business ownership:

* Private Companies
* Limited Liability Partnership
* Limited Life Companies
* Joint Ventures and Cooperatives
* Partnership
* Sole Proprietor
* Public Investment Companies
* International Business Companies
* Trust Funds

The Most Common Off-Shore Business Structure in Belize

Almost all offshore or foreign businesses use the International Business Company or Trust forms, sometimes in combination.

Cayman Islands Corporate Search

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on February 26, 2010
in Company Research and Due Diligence
. 0 Comments

The General Registry now offers a search feature that allows registered users to search online for Companies Information.

The Minority Opinion

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on January 26, 2009
in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence and Fraud
. 0 Comments

Jon Lowder at CI Marketplace writes that Lenny Fuld highlights the value of the contrarians in our midst when he explains why he’d like to meet a character in the Madoff mess:

No matter how certain, how comfortable you may be with an answer, a popular answer, an answer that comforts or confirms, you need to pay attention to … the minority and taking them seriously.

If you don’t like the content of a minority opinion, then find out if it is right through independent and impartial research!

Panama Company Register Now Online

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on January 9, 2009
in Company Research and Sources
. 3 Comments

Opening up a tax haven

 Panama recently put online their company registry. You can now retrieve the names of the current directors of every Panamanian company, as well as all the company’s filings themselves (minutes of company meetings, details of shareholdings, ownership, certificates of incorporation etc. etc.).

Nice, but you can only search by the name of the company. If you want to find somebody who is dodging tax or doing something else dubious, you really need to search by director’s name.

This tool fixes that problem. I’ve scraped all 600,000 company records, going back 30 years, and indexed by directors.

Litigation & Competitive Intelligence

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on December 17, 2008
in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Courts and Due Diligence
. 0 Comments

Litigation may tell you what the target company doesn’t want you to know.

Here are five things to look for when reviewing a company’s legal entanglements:

  • Is the company the target of large scale mass tort actions?
  • Is the company facing class action claims for faulty products and/or services?
  • Is the company facing lawsuits claiming shoddy or unfair business practices?
  • Have employees sued for wrongful dismissal?
  • Are shareholders claiming the company knew about material facts that depressed their stock price and failed to disclose them?

The Intellectual Property Shuffle

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on September 15, 2008
in Company Research and Intellectual Property Rights
. 0 Comments

Subsidiaries seem to be the bane of my existence lately. The following story is getting old.

A company has what seems like a good idea. It gets people to invest.

The intellectual property (IP) is registered to, or transferred to, a subsidiary, which is then spun-off. The newly independent company then transfers the IP to an off-shore company. The off-shore company then licenses the IP to the original firm.

SEC Announces Successor to EDGAR Database

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on September 2, 2008
in Company Research
. 0 Comments

“IDEA” Will Make Company and Fund Information Interactive

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox today unveiled the successor to the agency’s 1980s-era EDGAR database, which will give investors far faster and easier access to key financial information about public companies and mutual funds.

The new system is called IDEA, short for Interactive Data Electronic Applications. Based on a completely new architecture being built from the ground up, it will it first supplement and then eventually replace the EDGAR system. The decision to replace EDGAR marks the SEC’s transition from collecting forms and documents to making the information itself freely available to investors to give them better and more up-to-date financial disclosure in a form they can readily use.”

Corporate Filing Searches on the British Islands

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 25, 2008
in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence, Private Investigator and Search Strategies
. 1 Comment

Competitive Intelligence, Investigations, & Due Diligence

Starting a competitive intelligence research project, an investigation, or due diligence research usually entails a detailed look at the corporate filings, share structure, and accounts of the target or subject company.

Great Britain

On the island of Great Britain, there are two separate registries, one for England and Wales, and another for Scotland. Both of these are operated by Companies House. The accounts and filings for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland take the same format.

Ireland

On the island of Ireland, the Northern Ireland Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment of the Northern Ireland Government, (DETINI) houses the corporate filings and accounts. Corporate filings in the Republic of Ireland may be obtained online from the Companies Registration Office.

Channel Islands

On the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey the corporate filings are handled at the Jersey Financial Services Commission and the Guernsey Registry.  Jersey and Guernsey are tax havens, and companies incorporated there do not normally file accounts.

Isle of Man

The Isle of Man is a tax haven, and companies incorporated there do not normally file accounts. The Companies Registry holds corporate filings, and is part of the Financial Supervision Commission. Continue reading ‘Corporate Filing Searches on the British Islands’

Finding the Franchise Owner

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on July 16, 2008
in Canada, Company Research and Competitive Intelligence
. 0 Comments

Franchises identify themselves in the marketplace by using a common name and trademark. Each user of the name purchases a franchise which allows the franchisee the right to use the name. This is where the fun begins.

The franchisee will be a company or partnership with rights to use the name. In Canada, the right to use the name will normally be filed as a Business Name Registration. This allows a person, company, or partnership to operate under a name other than his or its proper name.

Now imagine you have a franchise at 123 Main Street in some Ontario town or city. How do you distinguish it from all the other franchises using the same business name?

In Ontario, OnCorp will allow you to view a list of all the business name registrations along with the recorded addresses.

A mouse click in the check-box next to the registration with the correct address will get you the Business Name Registration, and that will tell you the name of the company or partnership that owns that franchise location.

Investment Dealers Association Replaced

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 17, 2008
in Canada and Company Research
. 0 Comments

The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), a self-regulatory body, replaces both the 90 year old Investment Dealers Association and Market Regulations Services Inc. as the single overseer of the integrity of debt and equity trading in Canada.

The Investment Dealers Association the IDA had regulated member firms in the brokerage business as well as fixed-income trading and Market Regulations Services Inc. conducted market surveillance.

Don’t be Sloppy with Metadata or You’ll Get This

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 13, 2008
in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence, Private Investigator and Report Writing
. 2 Comments

Kroll’s sleuths are more Clouseau than Columbo

Inspector Clouseau is alive and well, and he works for Kroll Associates, the corporate spies who are supposed to specialise in finding, and keeping, company secrets.

…in fact, it is so boring that after downloading it I took to reading the ‘metadata’ concealed with the electronic document that tells you who wrote the report, why and when.The results were considerably more interesting than you might imagine. The report’s ‘properties’ field listed three Texas-based oil and gas exploration companies and the names of seven men - none of which has anything to do with the North Carolina Highway Patrol. What is more, the subject line mentioned the term ‘due diligence investigation’, which is corporatespeak for the type of inquiry often carried out by firms like Kroll when a company is considering a takeover.

Finding Corporate Owned Internet Domains

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on June 6, 2008
in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources
. 0 Comments

I was recently asked how to find the domains owned by a particular company. Here is what I recently unearthed on this topic.

Whois

You can still search RIPE (Regional Internet Registry for Europe), which contains registrations for most of the European countries. The US server at InterNic no longer allows this.

Databases

Domain Names database on Dialog includes information on registered domain names with Top Level Domains (TLD) of COM, NET, ORG, BIZ, and INFO as well as those that use country codes, e.g., AT. it can be searched by owner name. This database was last updated in September 2004.

DomainTools offers a rather expensive solution which is like an updated version of the Domain Names database. According to their web site:

…currently indexes all domains in the .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ, and .US TLDs. That is 103,042,578 domains as of today. In addition to indexing every active domain, it also knows about the 334,835,604 inactive domains that have been registered and deleted since the early days of the Internet. Great names are deleted daily so it is important that we keep track of them.

The partial word searching ability of Name Intelligence is unmatched by any other engine. We allow more options and faster results then anything else on the market and we continue to add new functionality monthly. In an information world a company can only focus on so many problems at one time. We dedicate our time to making domain searching faster and more efficient so our partners can dedicate their time to their own core technologies.

Every month Name Intelligence actively probes every domain name in its search engine to figure out the domain’s status. Our search results not only reflect active and deleted domains but domains with websites or not. We have taken searching for domains very seriously.

… DomainTools has leveraged the power of its Registrant Search engine to provide notifications whenever a person or company registers a new domain, has one transfered to them, or transfers a domain out of their control.

They report on two Richard McEachin names for $57. When I search on Scarborough, the city for the registrant address, it finds two records for one domain for $57. When I add Canada as a limiter, they says they have no reports.

Searching the name McEachin returned 248 records in 147 domains and a report cost of $147. When I add Canada as a limiter, they again say they have no reports. When I search on Scarborough, the city for the registrant address, it finds four records for one domain for $61.

Not exactly what I call a stellar performance.

Proxy Registrations

Many domain registrants are now are concealed by registrars such as Domains by Proxy.

Inter-Corporate Onwership Searching III

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on May 30, 2008
in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence and Due Diligence
. 0 Comments

The Inter-Corporate Ownership data produced by Statistics Canada contains information on the structures of Canadian enterprises. It provides the names of all holding and held companies (both domestic and foreign) in Canada and their respective ownership percentages.

The information is collected by Statistics Canada under the Corporations and Labour Unions Returns Act (CALURA) and is supplemented with information from international publications. In 1998 the act was amended to remove the labour unions component (Part II), leaving Part I of the Act unchanged. The revised Act, named the Corporations Returns Act, is equivalent to CALURA part I.

All the reporting companies must have gross revenues of at least 15 million dollars or assets exceeding 10 million dollars.

The updated data is reported quarterly. This data is the most accurate, timely, and complete data on inter-corporate ownership in Canada. It also provides detailed information of multi-national enterprises that have some component in Canada.


Inter-Corporate Ownership Searching II

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on May 23, 2008
in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence and U.S.A.
. 0 Comments

Corporate Affiliations

The Corporate Affiliations database appears on LexisNexis and Dialog. It can also be purchased as directories and on CD. According to the Dialog Bluesheet, it covers about 184,000 U.S. and non-U.S. companies. This includes private and public companies, both parents and their subsidiaries and major divisions. All major U.S. domestic and international stock exchange listed companies are included. U.S. privately held companies must have reported annual sales in excess of $10 million and foreign privately held companies must have reported annual sales in excess of $50 million to be included in the database. Each record includes the executive names, director names, corporate family hierarchy. Net worth, total assets, and total liabilities sometimes appear in the record.

I have never found this resource particularly useful because it has a high threshold for inclusion of companies. It is also US-centric. It shines for researching large enterprises with a large component in the U.S.A..

Inter-Corporate Ownership Searching I

Published
by
Richard McEachin
on May 20, 2008
in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence and Due Diligence
. 0 Comments

Finding how your subject company fits into a large enterprise structure may turn into an avocation with some companies, but I’ll tell you how to get started.

Begin by understanding the terminology, then in the case of Canada, realize that you will have difficulty recognising interlocking boards as you may not search corporate filings by director name. This leaves you with the immediate subject company as your starting point.

Typically, I start with Dun & Bradstreet Canadian Market Identifiers (DMI). The advantages of the DMI databases (there are several DMI databases) are the number of companies in the database (over 1.2 million), and no sales or asset threshold for inclusion in the database.

The most useful fields in this database are the Dun’s Numbers for the company and its Parent and Ultimate Domestic Parent. This identifies three levels of the overall enterprise to explore in one record. You will have the information on the subject company, and further searches will identify its immediate parent and the ultimate domestic parent.

I then search the D&B Who Owns Whom database for the Ultimate Domestic Parent to identify the foreign parent if one exists. If I find an Ultimate Global Parent, then I determine what my record cost will be by listing the companies in the family tree. Usually, I end up paying the lowest amount as there will be 25 or fewer companies in the family tree. I have never had to pay the full record cost because I have never come across an enterprise family with over 200 member companies.

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