Identification of companies

The first step was to identify the companies that were relevant for the first D-EITI report. Here the Independent Administrator used a database analysis 1 to select all the companies which are mainly active in the extractive industry and which are allocated to the lignite, crude oil/natural gas and quarried natural resources (including potash & salts) sectors. The classification criterion was the allocation of the companies to sub-sections 05 to 08 pursuant to Regulation 1893/2006/EC of December 20, 2006 (also read the recommendations of the Independent Administrator). In the second step, these companies were filtered according to the size criteria stipulated by the HGB for ‘large’ companies.
The Independent Administrator manually expanded the group of these provisionally-identified companies by including groups of companies in which a potential ‘consolidated tax group infection’ caused by ‘active’ subsidiaries existed (for details also read the recommendations of the Independent Administrator). The results were subsequently subjected to an analysis by the MSG members. The following knowledge and/or results were obtained:
  • Companies the main activities of which are allocated to the storage (e.g. construction and operationof cavern storage facilities for the storage of natural gas) of natural resources underground are not considered, since the extraction of natural resources is not their primary activity, despite their being allocated to sub-sections 05 to 08.
  • All the companies identified and allocated to sub-section 07 (ore mining) do not actively engage in extractive mining in Germany and are therefore not considered.
On the basis of the above-described selection process, a total of 48 companies and/or groups of companies were identified for possible participation in the D-EITI process and were requested to take part. Due to the difficult data situation, however, this number (48) cannot be described as being clear or conclusive.

It is evident that the selection criteria specified by the MSG ensure a prominent level of coverage for the lignite, crude oil and/or natural gas, potash and salts/industrial brine sectors (See table on participating companies). These are solely free-to-mine natural resources and these particular sectors contain comparatively few, but relatively large business units. On the other hand, quarried natural resources are extracted by a very high number of business operations with many extraction facilities and/or mines. One key reason for the purely regional production and marketing of these natural resources is the prohibitive cost of their transport. According to estimates by the German Building Materials Association – Quarried Natural Resources (BBS), the 25 largest quarried natural resources suppliers would account for only about 1.6% of the total number of companies in the industry and around 22% of the total number of the industry’s extraction sites. It must also be assumed that a number of companies and/or consolidated companies (which are already among the 25 largest providers in this sector) do not fulfil the size criteria and are therefore not identified by the selection criteria screen adopted by the MSG. As a result of the high number of non-identified small and medium-sized enterprises in the quarried natural resources sector, the coverage of this sector clearly lags behind that of the other sectors.

1 Orbis Europe Datenbank des Anbieters Bureau van Dijk (www.bvdinfo.com), abgerufen am 2. Oktober 2018.

IDENTIFICATION OF COMPANIES

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