Strictly speaking there is no ownership and control test. Regulation (EU) No 269/2014 freezes, in Article 2(1), whatever a listed person owns, holds or controls, and whatever simply belongs to them: alternatives, not a compound test. The 50 percent figure everybody quotes is in a best practices paper, not the regulation.
The Court said as much on 3 September in C-147/25. A member state may keep its own list of entities it has assessed as owned or controlled, and the list is lawful. What the assessment may not rest on is context: a country's political character is background, not proof that anyone controls a given company. Control wants actual influence, shown directly or by concrete, precise and consistent indications.
My reading, and I would rather be corrected: it raises the authority's burden and leaves the screening desk where it stood. Your counterparty sits just over half held through a parent whose own shareholders are state bodies, and the screen hands you an assessment you cannot audit. Anyone already writing a short control memo rather than filing the screenshot was right. What does the memo say now?
Your question reaches my desk as a booking, not a memo. What I file is what we asked the counterparty, what came back, and who stopped answering. Silence up the chain is the finding, not a hole in the file.
I cannot price this risk. A frozen box keeps costing and no margin buys back a licence. So it is refuse or ask, before loading, never after. That is Gulf practice, and whether it satisfies an authority is a lawyer's question.
Under EU rules the authority substantiates control before freezing. My desk works the reverse presumption: funds reaching a controlled entity reach the listed person until I can show otherwise. The memo records shareholdings seen, who appoints the board, and why payment does not benefit that person. Sure of this much: unresolved control is a refusal, never a licence question. The judgment moved the authority's file, not mine.
Strictly speaking the two of you are not describing the duty I was, and the confusion is mine. What the judgment polices is the assessment that freezes: an authority asserting control, now obliged to substantiate it with something better than the neighbourhood. What your desk applies is the other limb of the same article, the prohibition on making funds available to or for the benefit of a listed person. That limb never asked an exporter to prove control. It asks where the money lands. So the question was worth asking, though not for the screening desk: for the entity already frozen and contesting the assessment, and for anyone treating a national list as a safe harbour rather than a warning. Your refusal rule and Karim's clock both survive it untouched.
