Asian Angle | As Myanmar seals corporate data, investors may be implicated in junta’s bid to evade sanctions
- The junta’s move to shut access to the MyCO database will shield military-linked shareholdings and help establish front companies to evade sanctions
- The inability to do due diligence gives foreign investors itching to return all the plausible deniability they need to get in bed with the generals
The Myanmar Companies Online (MyCO) fee-based platform was established with Japanese technical help in August 2018 in accordance with the country’s 2017 Law on Corporations, under the Ministry of Planning and Investment.
MyCO listed not just the publicly available corporate information for 120,000 firms, but also detailed personal information on both active and former directors and shareholders, including their ownership stakes, date of appointment, ID numbers, addresses and birth dates.
The public corporate information is still available but the detailed personal information no longer is, although a leaks publisher, Distributed Denial of Secrets, has released the data through February 2021 in response to the military’s coup that month.
What is the State Administrative Council (SAC), as the junta is formally called, trying to hide?
The obvious first answer is the SAC’s self-enrichment. SAC members and their family-owned corporations have won many lucrative contracts in construction, solar power, electrification, road construction and cement.
At the time of the coup, there were some 27 known corporations owned by the children of senior military leaders, including members of the SAC. Of the 75 individuals that the US government has sanctioned since the 2021 coup d’état, 22 are the spouses or adult children of senior members of the SAC leadership. Four of the 25 US-sanctioned firms are owned by junta chief Min Aung Hlaing’s children.
