malta-files

Journalists working with EIC.network dug into hundreds of thousands of documents that show how Malta operates a tax system where companies pay the lowest tax on profits in the EU. Part of the data that was used for this research is the public Malta Registry of Companies.

We have re-arranged, cleaned and made searchable in new ways the public information contained in the register.

For more information about Malta Files investigation, see : https://eic.network/projects/malta-files

Keep in mind that the data we make available is only for information purposes and does not indicate any illegal activity. For any current and official status go to the Malta Registry of Companies here http://rocsupport.mfsa.com.mt/pages/SearchCompanyInformation.aspx

technical information

The files in this repository were produced by scraping, using this code. They are organized as follows:

• the raw data we scraped from the web is in the companies directory
  • each file is named after a company ID as found in the registry
  • each company contains all the details in the companies list, plus the extra information from the lookup information
• the script extract-people.py is used by calling python ./extract_people.py
  • this iterates over the companies data and extracts all entities (people and companies) that are declared as involved parties (e.g. shareholders)
  • the results are placed in the entities directory
    • there are two files (CSV and JSON) with all the results grouped together
    • the two directories (csv and json) contain the same results, but grouped by nationality and in separate files