A lot of jurisdictions do maintain a beneficial owners database (e.g. Companies House in the UK maintains a list of all companies) but often these are not public. For example the ECJ recently made these illegal in the EU (see e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/e4b31a4e-a79d-40f7-8a19-c1e451a95...).
That may clash with the European Directive on Electronic Commerce for businesses which do anything online. If you just have a shell company to own your yacht, that may be entitled to privacy, but if you do transactions online within the EU, the entity has to be properly identified.[1]
