Legal entities are obligated to disclose information about beneficiaries

In June 2016 The Federal Law No. 215-FZ of June 23, 2015 «On the amendments to the Federal Law on the countermeasures against legalization (laundering) of incomes obtained in a criminal way and financing of terrorism» and the Code of Administrative Offences of the Russian Federation» was endorsed by the President of the Russian Federation.

The Law defines the beneficiary owner as a physical person, who directly or indirectly owns the legal entity or has the ability to control its actions. The ownership means the dominant participation in the share capital, in other words, the share more than 25%.

According to the Law, the legal entities are obligated to know about their beneficiary owners, make possible and reasonable steps aimed to identify the data specified by the Federal Law No. 215-FZ. Such information contains the following:

• first name, second name and paternal name; 
• nationality;
• date of birth;
• the requisites of identity paper;
• the data of migration card or document, confirming the right of foreign citizen or the person without citizenship to stay in Russia;
• residential/registration address or place of residence;
• taxpayer identification number (upon availability).

The legal entities are obligated to update the above data at least once a year, to document this data and keep it for at least 5 years from the date of receipt.

Besides, the legal entities are have to provide this information upon the request of the relevant authorized government bodies in terms established by the Government of the Russian Federation.

The breach of duty is punishable by an administrative fine from 30 to 40 th RUB – for officials and from 100 to 500 th RUB – for legal entities.

According to The Federal Law No. 152-FZ of July 27, 2006, the data about physical persons is a personal data. The requirements for collection, accumulation, storage and dissemination of personal data are identified by the same Law. To satisfy the requirements, the personal data processors are obligated to make the relevant organizational and technical operations, which require the certain material costs. These are quite expensive operations even for large enterprises; it might be tens of millions RUB. To reduce costs in this case is quite difficult as the corporate information systems have their specifics, this, in turn, leads to additional threats. For this reason the execution of procedures relating to personal data will be quite expensive for small and medium enterprises. 

Information about personal data processing and storage procedures in the Internet can be found in our publication: http://www.credinform.ru/en-US/news/details/df88fcb5b9f1.