The concealment of the information about the owners of the LLC contained in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities will return Russia to the 2000s, a wave of “one-day” firms, “technical” companies and other abuses will begin with a constant increase in fraud in the business environment, one of the analysts of the Russian counterparty verification service told The Insider.

According to the expert, the absence of this information in the public domain will make it difficult to trace the chain of founders to the ultimate beneficiary, to identify "technical companies" (which do not conduct real activities and are used only to optimize taxation), as well as situations with "alternative liquidation" (getting rid of the company through a change of owners or sale instead of liquidation).

The day before, Interfax, citing a source in the Ministry of Finance, said that the department had proposed removing information about the owners of the LLC from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities. We are talking about the proposal of the National Financial Association to keep records of LLC participants by analogy with JSC, where the registers of shareholders are maintained by special registrar companies. And, as a result, it is proposed to remove this information from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.

The Insider's interlocutor suggested that information about participants can still be obtained through a request. However, as the process of obtaining information becomes more complicated, this will inevitably lead to an increase in abuse. As a result, in his opinion, small businesses will be hit by scammers.

Now in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities you can freely access information about companies registered in Russia, including the names of their general directors and other data. It was possible to limit data on participants/leaders since the summer of 2019 (according to the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation of 06.06.2019 N 729). This is possible in the following cases:

• if the company is subject to sanctions or other restrictive measures imposed by a foreign state or other foreign association (NATO, UN, etc.);
• if the organization is a credit organization and accompanies defense orders;
• if the organization is located in the Crimea and Sevastopol (including branches).

In addition, according to the Federal Law of August 3, 2018 N 290-FZ, international companies can hide information about themselves.