An assessment of beneficial ownership reporting compliance in Indonesia’s pulp sector

Indonesia has recently taken an important step towards greater accountability in the forestry sector. In March 2023, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF) established a requirement that all forestry concession-holders report detailed information about who actually controls each forestry company.

This new forestry sector policy reflects a broader push by the Government of Indonesia for greater transparency in corporate ownership. In 2018, the Government of Indonesia introduced a regulation that requires all companies to report their beneficial owners. In 2022, the Government also began providing public access to an online registry of the reported beneficial owners maintained by the Ministry of Law and Human Rights.

These policies promise to bring about a fundamental shift towards greater corporate accountability among Indonesian forestry companies. Five years after the beneficial ownership regulation was issued and a year after the public registry was launched, it is a good time to start assessing its performance. How complete and accurate are the data? And are any adjustments needed to strengthen this transparency initiative?

To start to answer these questions, we collected and analyzed data from the beneficial ownership registry for Indonesia’s pulp sector, consisting of seven pulp mill companies and 277 industrial wood fiber plantation companies.