Implementation of the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) Register of Companies and Other Legal Entities in Cyprus
Cyprus went ahead with the full transposition of the 4th European Directive (EU 2015/849) of the European Parliament (4th AML Directive) into domestic law and activated the implementation of the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) Register of Companies and other legal entities in Cyprus.
On the 16th December 2020, the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Cyprus appointed the Registrar of Companies (RoC) as the competent authority for the maintenance of the central Register of UBO of companies and other legal entities, and authorised the RoC to collect UBO information of companies and other legal entities through the intermediate system solution that has been developed.
Accordingly the RoC made an announcement that the start date for collection of the data for companies is set for Monday, 18 January 2021.
From this date, companies will be granted a period of 6 months (i.e. until 19 July 2021) for registration in the system that has been developed for the collection of information concerning their UBO. It should be emphasised that the current system is an intermediate solution and access to it will only be available for the competent authorities upon request to the Registrar of Companies. Thus the UBO information shall not be publicly available.
The information collected will be transferred to the final system solution to be developed in the second half of 2021 and access to it will be based on the provisions of the 5th European Directive (EU 2018/843) of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 May 2018, concerning the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing.
The companies are invited to start collecting the above mentioned information which they should already have in their corporate files, based on the provisions of article 61 (A) of the Prevention and Combating of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Law of 2007, as amended.
For further information and clarifications please contact us via email at info@zambartaslegal.com or via telephone +357 22262108
[…] Further details can be found on our previous article dated 28 December 2020 published on our website “Implementation of the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) Register of Companies and Other Legal Entit…. […]