Journalists working with EIC.network dug into hundreds of thousands of documents that show how Malta operates a tax system where companies pay the lowest tax on profits in the EU. Part of the data that was used for this research is the public Malta Registry of Companies. If you want to use our scraper yourself, go ahead, you should find everything you need here.
We have re-arranged, cleaned and made searchable in new ways the public information contained in the register.
For more information about Malta Files investigation, see : https://eic.network/projects/malta-files
Keep in mind that the data we make available is only for information purposes and does not indicate any illegal activity. For any current and official status go to the Malta Registry of Companies here http://rocsupport.mfsa.com.mt/pages/SearchCompanyInformation.asp
This a scraper that uses PhantomJS and Selenium for navigating around, so you'd better have those two installed to begin with.
In the file proxy_list.txt you will find a list of proxies that need to be supplied in order for the scraper to be able to change its IP address once every few hundred requests. Of course you can supply your own proxies in the list, so we only left one as example.
For the most part, navigating the Maltese RoC website requires authentication.
In the file lookup.py you will find a dict called _LOGIN_DATA,
which is where you should provide your own credentials.
The whole scraping machine starts by running the shell script found in the root directory of this project.
After you start it, make sure the internet connection is stable and let it finish. It will likely take a day or more, depending on your bandwidth and proxies speed.
That's it, after it runs you should see some results similar to what is now in the output directory.
See the results repository for more info about the data extracted.