A small number of financial intermediaries can control major companies through fragmented ownership chains

Researchers traced ownership networks of Italian firms and found that corporate control concentrates in surprisingly few hands even when formal ownership looks scattered across many shareholders. This means a handful of financial intermediaries — banks, holding companies, investment funds — can exercise governance power over major companies with relatively small equity stakes, hidden inside multilayered ownership structures.

For decades, regulators and economists have assumed that fragmented ownership protects against excessive control — if many shareholders own a piece of a company, no single actor dominates it. This paper shows that assumption breaks when you trace the actual ownership chains: fragmentation at the surface masks centralization underneath. The practical effect is that strategic autonomy and economic sovereignty in key sectors may rest on far fewer decision-makers than corporate org charts suggest. If a handful of financial intermediaries can quietly accumulate control through complex structures, governments have no visibility into who actually runs critical infrastructure or major firms — and current disclosure rules won't catch it.