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What happened to Jordan’s Companies Control Department search?
21 April 2020
Update (3 May 2020):
As of 3 May 2020, the search functionality is back online and appears to work as before. No official or media announcements were identified announcing its return. END UPDATE
If you are working in the due diligence or business intelligence field you may have used the Kingdom of Jordan’s official corporate registry database in the past, provided by the Companies Control Department CCD (دائرة مراقبة الشركات). While conducting an investigation recently in Jordan, I realized that the “company search” function (الاستعلام عن الشركات) had been removed from the CCD website. The search functionality has been of great use in past due diligence investigations, as it allowed searches by name of a company, a director or shareholder and provided a great level of detail on each company, including names of shareholders and directors.
What the website looked like before:
What the website looks like now:
As it turns out, the Jordanian Minister of Industry, Trade and Supply, decided in early April 2020 to remove public access to the corporate registry database due to alleged abuse of the personal information therein by those seeking to fraudulently acquire transportation permits.
This seems like an overreaction: there are a great many countries in the world that either have openly-accessible corporate registration data or where such data is accessible for a fee. They have not closed-down such data in the face of similar issues.
The alleged identity theft seems to me to be more of a problem with Jordanian government offices being too easily duped and not conducting sufficient checks of those applying for permits.
Hopefully, the Jordanian authorities will reverse this decision soon, as the CCD database did much for transparency in business dealings in Jordan. In the meantime, the only recourse is to obtain records directly from the CCD offices on the ground.
