[1] Nonetheless, despite the constitutional provisions on the right to impose an obligation on the media to make public their sources of finance, the Parliament has never enacted the applicable legislation.
504, requires the disclosure of all the information necessary to identify the owners of media companies, e.g. name and contact details of the media organization; name and contact detail of owners; country of domicile of company with an interest; citizenship / residence status of individual with an interest beyond a given threshold.
However, the disclosure requirement does not apply to beneficial ownership, which refers to shares of a media company hold on behalf of another person.
According to the law, the information must be reported to the National Audiovisual Council, a public regulatory authority under the control of the Parliament.
[4] Moreover, as there are minimal financial sanctions for failure to report in time, in practice few companies comply with the obligation to update ownership information.
According to some critics, the Trade Register Office shows insufficient information since the real owner of the media and who effectively controls them remain hidden.
Among the main shortcomings there is the absence of the requirement to disclose all the necessary data to establish which are the owners in case of indirect control or having significant interests in the media company.
In sum, a set of factors, including the difficulty in ascertain indirect control and significant interest, implementation problems as well as the challenges in accessing public information result in a significant difficulty for the general public in accessing all the key information to establish who effectively owns and ultimately controls a media outlet.