4 Simple and Reliable Ways to Check a Legal Entity – Resident of Ukraine

At the stage of making decisions whether it is worth to start business negotiations with a potential business partner, any information is valuable to help to determine in advance or formulate a thought. Ways of collecting this information may be different: those that require some material costs (for example, the collection of information through specialized law firms, etc.) and those that require only time (free available resources). This article will provide examples of fast, reliable and at the same time, in some cases, completely free of charge possibilities to find information about the legal entity – resident of Ukraine. You just should know a minimum of Ukrainian or Russian and your keyboard layout should support Cyrillic characters.
We propose to focus on the information provided by the public authorities, because this information corresponds to the criteria such as credibility, in contrast to the information from the search engines like Google where everything, including unverified information, is published. So, the list and characteristics of open sources of information on legal entities – residents of Ukraine:

Source of information №1
Unified State Register of legal entities and individuals – entrepreneurs of Ministry of Justice, the link is: https://usr.minjust.gov.ua
Search through it can be done with the name of the legal entity or EDRPOU (a unique 8-digit number for each legal entity). Upon request, you can see date of registration of the company, business address, telephone numbers, the director at the date of the request and the date since which the director has been in charge of the enterprise, the procedure of liquidation, general information about the owner of the company. Also, this registry provides a report on the number of public enterprises in relation to enforcement proceedings by a court decision which has entered into force, and the presence of a large number of such productions may indicate a certain risk of cooperation with such a counterparty.
Also you can use a paid service on this site. Paying with cards of international systems Visa/MasterCard, about 2 EURO, a person can get more information, and has the possibility to request some information about the company, not only about current date, but also about any date in the past.

Source of information №2
Some information about the Ukrainian counterpart may be interesting, which is provided by the fiscal authorities of the State Service of Ukraine. So, you can check if a potential counterparty has tax debts using a completely free service with the link: http://sfs.gov.ua/businesspartner
Search for information is similar to the search for information in the mentioned above registry of Ministry of Justice of Ukraine by naming the counterparty or its tax number. The answer to the query is generated in real-time and contains some information relating to the enterprise tax arrears, signs of fictitious (special technique of the State Fiscal Service). It is clear how to interpret the data about the debt or fictitious, although the fact of receiving such information can not be the only evidence of the unreliability of the enterprise.

Information Source №3
Verification of the information about your potential contractors can be provided by an open Unified Register of judicial decisions, the link is: http://www.reyestr.court.gov.ua
Searching is absolutely free and can be carried out with the name or EDRPOU number (a unique 8-digit number for each legal entity). From the content of judicial decisions you can learn some information about sues of your potential contractor, who initiated the process, which judicial decisions were taken, how often the potential contractors have sued. It’s really interesting information for analysis and understanding of the formation about a counterparty.

Source of information №4
This source of information is not free, but the cost of obtaining information is only about 1 Euro, and the importance of the provided information is valuable. This source is the State Register of rights of real estate, the link is: https://kap.minjust.gov.ua
This register is organized by the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, and it contains some information about real estate, including land, property rights for real estate, information on encumbrances, mortgages. You can get some information about registered real rights for real estate by the following criteria: address; registration number of the property; cadastral number of the land; identity data of fisical (last name, first name or identification number of a natural person – the taxpayer) or legal (name or number EDRPOU) persons. First, you must pay with payment cards of international systems Visa/MasterCard the sum for each individual request. Also in this registry you can check any document of the State Register of rights of real estate, that means you can check the validity of documents from the counterparty.
The only limiting factor for the use of the register by foreign persons is that the user has to conclude an agreement on the recognition of electronic signature (digital signature) with the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, and therefore those who are outside of Ukraine can not make it alone. However, there is the decision of this situation . For example, you can ask a resident of Ukraine who already has an accredited electronic signature certificate to verify the information which you are interested in.

Obtained from public and reliable sources information will provide a complete “picture” of a company in Ukraine with which you would like to co-operate. This information can already be assessed in interconnection with other, less accurate information, e.g. data from searching engines. An analysis of the received information will assess whether it is necessary to have a common cause and to start cooperation with a new business partner. If there are any doubts in your conclusions, you can consult a Ukrainian lawyer who has extensive experience in obtaining and evaluating information about enterprises – residents of Ukraine.

Author: Kydalov Igor