> How to find out who runs a company in Spain and the UK using BORME, Companies House and OpenCorporates, without mixing up namesakes. Blog · [Company records](https://pandorasearch.com/blog/topic/company-records/) # Who runs a company: BORME, Companies House and OpenCorporates 28 October 2026 · 6 min read Knowing who is behind a company underpins many decisions: signing with a supplier, onboarding a customer, investing, publishing a story or spotting a conflict of interest. In Spain and the UK that information is public, but it lives in different places and reads differently. This article explains what each source publishes, how to work out who holds a post today, and where the limits are, starting with people who share a name. ## Legitimate uses - **Supplier and customer due diligence**, which compliance teams call KYB: knowing the business you are dealing with. - **Anti-money laundering.** Obliged entities must identify their customers and their beneficial owners; in Spain the duty comes from Ley 10/2010. - **Journalism and research**, for example on public procurement. - **Conflicts of interest** in a purchase, a hire or a board appointment. - **Checking your own company:** what has been published and whether it is up to date. ## BORME: what it is and what it publishes The Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil (BORME) is Spain's official companies gazette, published on working days by the state agency that also publishes the Official State Gazette (BOE). It is not the register itself: it is the gazette in which acts recorded at the provincial commercial registries are published, along with notices the law requires companies to make public. ### Section One: registered acts Section One is organised by province. Each entry starts with the company name, lists the registered acts and ends with the registration details: volume, folio, sheet, entry number and date. The registry sheet (hoja) identifies the company within its registry and helps you tell apart two companies with similar names. The acts that matter most for working out who runs a company: - **Incorporation (Constitución):** start of operations, corporate purpose, registered address and capital, and often the first directors. - **Appointments (Nombramientos):** the role and the name. Abbreviations are common: sole director, joint and several directors, joint directors, board member, managing director, attorney (apoderado), liquidator, auditor. - **Re-elections (Reelecciones)**, when the same post is renewed. - **Departures (Ceses/Dimisiones) and revocations (Revocaciones):** who leaves, and from which post. - **Declaration of single-member status (unipersonalidad):** the company's sole shareholder. Other acts complete the story: changes of address, purpose or name, capital increases and reductions, dissolution, the company's extinction and insolvency proceedings. ### Section Two: announcements and legal notices This section carries notices that companies must publish: calls to general meetings, mergers, demergers, conversions or capital reductions. It shows operations in progress before they are registered. ## Reading the history of a post BORME publishes events, not states. It does not say "this person runs this company today": it says they were appointed on one date and, if it happened, that they left on another. To know who holds a post today, you have to reconstruct the sequence: the latest appointment with no later departure. There are caveats: - A term may have expired without the departure being published in the period you are looking at. - One person can hold several posts in the same company. - Each registry writes names its own way: "SURNAMES FIRST NAME" in some provinces, "FIRST NAME SURNAMES" in others. For a decision that matters, the authoritative source is the commercial register itself: an information extract (nota simple) or a certificate. Pandora keeps a local index of Section One, built from the BOE's open data API. Given a person's name, it returns the companies where an appointment, re-election, departure or revocation was published, with date and province. Given a company, it returns its incorporation, its changes and who has run it, separating those still in post from those who left. It matches names in any word order, states which period the index covers, and does not store tax ID numbers (NIF) or the details of insolvency proceedings. In the graph, every relationship carries the role and the date. ## Companies House: officers and people with significant control The UK's companies register offers free search and a free API (registration required). For each company it publishes: - **The profile:** number, status, incorporation date, registered office, nature of business (SIC codes) and filing history, such as annual accounts. - **Officers:** directors and secretaries, with appointment and resignation dates, nationality, occupation, country of residence, and month and year of birth. - **Persons with significant control (PSCs):** anyone holding more than 25% of the shares or voting rights, with the right to appoint or remove a majority of the board, or exercising significant influence or control. This register has existed since 2016. Month and year of birth are what make it possible to separate namesakes. Pandora uses them: if several people share a name but have different birth dates, it lists them rather than merging them. One known limitation: for years, Companies House published what companies filed without verifying it. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 introduced identity verification for directors and PSCs, which has been rolled out in phases. ## OpenCorporates: many jurisdictions in one place OpenCorporates aggregates company register data from more than 140 jurisdictions: number, jurisdiction, status, incorporation and dissolution dates, address, previous names and, where the source register publishes them, officers. Coverage depends on what each register publishes, so missing officers do not mean there are none. In Pandora it works with your own OpenCorporates token. With no date of birth, namesakes cannot be separated: when there are few appointments they enter the graph as possible matches; when there are many, they are only listed. For entities with a Legal Entity Identifier (LEI), GLEIF's public database can also show the direct and ultimate parent, where the entity has reported them. ## Limits and namesakes - **Namesakes.** Many people share a full name, and BORME publishes neither date of birth nor ID number. Do not attribute posts to a person on the strength of a name alone. Pandora presents a partial name match as a possible namesake, not as the person. - **Formal directors.** The register shows who holds the post, not who actually makes the decisions. Nominees and front men exist. - **Beneficial ownership.** Who really controls a Spanish company is not published in BORME. Across the EU, general public access to beneficial ownership registers was also restricted after a ruling by the Court of Justice of the EU in November 2022. - **Delays.** Weeks can pass between a decision, its registration and its publication. - **Shareholders.** Spain does not publish the shareholders of a limited company (SL), except a sole shareholder. ## A method for answering "who is behind this?" 1. **Pin down the exact entity:** legal name, legal form, jurisdiction and, if possible, registration number or registry sheet. 2. **Rebuild its history:** incorporation, posts, changes of address and name. 3. **Separate the current from the historical.** 4. **Cross-reference each person with other companies only when their identity is solid:** the same co-directors, the same province or, in the UK, the same date of birth. 5. **Look at the graph:** the company, its people and those people's other companies. Relationships that repeat are the ones that deserve attention. 6. **Confirm with official documents** if the decision matters: a nota simple or Companies House filings. 7. **Record every source with its date.** ## Legal and ethical note Company register data is official and reusable, but it is also personal data: the GDPR applies to the names of directors and shareholders even when an official gazette has published them. Use the information for the purpose you have, do not build profiles of people beyond it, and do not confuse a company role with the private life of the person who holds it. This article is not legal advice. ## Frequently asked questions **How do I find out who currently runs a Spanish company?** Reconstruct from BORME the latest appointment to each post with no later departure. For an important decision, request a nota simple from the commercial register, which reflects the current registered position. **Does BORME show who owns a company?** Generally not. It publishes directors, attorneys and the sole shareholder where there is one, but not the shareholders of a limited company or its beneficial owners. **What are persons with significant control?** The beneficial owners published by Companies House: people who hold more than 25% of the shares or votes, can appoint or remove a majority of the board, or exercise significant control over the company. **How do I avoid mixing up two people with the same name?** Do not attribute posts on the strength of a name alone. Use the date of birth where it exists, as at Companies House, plus context: province, sector, co-directors and dates. **Look up who runs a company in Pandora, with the source of every appointment.** Every new account gets 3 trial searches, with no card. [See plans and pricing](https://pandorasearch.com/pricing/) Tags: companies BORME Companies House due diligence company registers ## Keep reading - [OSINT and the GDPR: investigating within the law](https://pandorasearch.com/blog/osint-and-gdpr-investigating-within-the-law/): Lawful basis, purpose limitation, minimisation, special categories and audit trails: how to apply the GDPR to an OSINT investigation. - [Domain and IP reconnaissance with open sources](https://pandorasearch.com/blog/domain-and-ip-reconnaissance/): DNS, RDAP, Certificate Transparency, passive DNS, exposed services and reputation feeds: a passive method for analysing a domain or IP. - [How to investigate an email address with OSINT](https://pandorasearch.com/blog/how-to-investigate-an-email-address-with-osint/): What open sources reveal about an email address: provider and MX, Gravatar, registered services, breach exposure, and how to corroborate it. 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