The forthcoming deadline for Serbian entities to register their Beneficial Owners

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On 8 June 2018 Serbia enacted the Law on Central Register of Beneficial Owners (the “Law”), whereby it introduced into its legislation the Central register of beneficial owners (the “Central Register”). The Law imposed the obligation on the Serbian Business Registers Agency (hereinafter: “SBRA”) to no later than 31 December 2018 set up the Central Register as the public, unique, central, electronic database containing the data on beneficial owners of the entities incorporated in Serbia. Thus, in case that Serbian entities, that fall under the scope of Registered Subjects in sense of the Law, were incorporated before 31 December 2018, their authorized persons are obliged to register with SBRA the relevant data on their Beneficial Owners by no later than 31 January 2019. As for the recently incorporated entities, they are obliged to register relevant data within 15 days following their incorporation.

Following the enactment of the Law, Ministry of Economy enacted the Guidelines for Registering Beneficial Owners of the Registered Subjects into the Central Register, in order to provide SBRA the instructions on how to apply the subject Law (“SBRA Guidelines”). SBRA Guidelines thus contain certain explanations of the standards and criteria stipulated under the Law, whereby the most significant one refers to clarifications on the manner in which the Beneficial Owners should be determined – the Beneficial Owners of Registered Subjects are not supposed to cumulatively fulfill all the criteria in order for them to be considered as Beneficial Owners, but rather, they are to be registered within the Central Register through the fulfillment of only one of the criteria prescribed by the Law.

Registration of Beneficial Owners into the Central Register can be conducted via the website of SBRA – the representative of the Registered Subject will need to enter into the System for centralized user login (available on SBRA website) the data concerning the Beneficial Owner, as well as the basis due to which the person designated as Beneficial Owner obtained that status. Nevertheless, the documents that would serve as evidence to the data concerning the Beneficial Owner status are not to be submitted thereby, but only kept by the Registered Subjects in the next 10 years, following their registration.