Russia Federal Tax Registry (EGRUL)

What is the Russia Federal Tax Registry?

Russia Federal Tax Registry (abbreviated EGRUL in Russian) is a state-sponsored database containing all registration files of all legal entities registered in Russia, including state-owned enterprises and non-commercial organizations. It also provides regular updates on their status.

How to search the Russia Federal Tax Registry

Companies in Russia have two official names: a full name (полное наименование) and a short name (сокращенное наименование). While both names appear on a company’s EGRUL filing, companies are usually indexed by the short name.

This can cause issues when searching, as there could be hundreds of companies that share the short name, making it hard to disambiguate the queried company from the rest. 

For example, searching for the Rostec subsidiary, Tecmash (Техмаш in Russian), you will find that there are 920 companies in EGRUL under that name. However, if you search for the company’s tax identification number (7743813961), only that company will show up as a result.

For these reasons, it is best to search EGRUL using a company’s tax identification number (INN), if possible.

Overview of contents

The Russia Federal Tax Registry contains reports to state registrars and tax authorities that organizations are required to file whenever there is any change in their status. These changes include incorporation, liquidation, change of legal entity type, merger, and dissolution.

Whether a company is required to disclose shareholders is dependent on what type of company it is. As covered in the Sayari Learn article on Russian corporate structures, limited liability companies (LLC) are required to disclose any changes to their shareholders. These changes are reflected within an LLC’s EGRUL filing. 

However, changes to a joint-stock company’s (JSC) shareholders will not appear in its EGRUL filing. EGRUL reports of JSCs only show the founding shareholders on the date of incorporation.

It is important to note that EGRUL does not publish any actual copies of documents, such as articles of incorporation or shareholder meeting minutes. Instead, the data is provided in aggregate where each section of the table lists a date to which the data in that section can be attributed.

EGRUL Report Break Down

An EGRUL report features many sections covering a wide variety of information. This article will break down some of the sections considered by Sayari analysts to be most useful in an investigation:

• Names (Наименование)
• Addresses (Адрес (место нахождения))
• Registration (Сведения о регистрации)
• Liquidation (Сведения о прекращении) – if applicable
• Taxpayer registration details (Сведения об учете в налоговом органе)
• Company capital (Сведения об уставном капитале (складочном капитале, уставном фонде, паевых взносах))
• Official representative (Сведения о лице, имеющем право без доверенности действовать от имени юридического лица)
• Shareholders (Сведения об учредителях (участниках) юридического лица)
• Branch offices (Сведения о филиалах и представительствах)

Names (Наименование)

This section of the report contains the long and short versions of the company’s name as well as the date the names became official. 

 Vocabulary:

It is important to note that a company’s corporate extension is part of both the long and short forms of its names. However, it is only abbreviated in the short name.

Addresses (Адрес (место нахождения))

This section of the report shows the company’s registered address. This address may differ from the one that the company actually conducts business at, so it is a good idea to check the company’s website for additional addresses.

Streets in Russia are often renamed, and when this happens the EGRUL file will be updated accordingly. In these cases, the address will appear to have changed, but in reality the company will remain in the same geographic location.

Vocabulary:

Registration (Сведения о регистрации)

The registration system and numbering convention currently in use has been in place since 2002. This means that any companies incorporated and registered before July 2002 had to undergo re-registration after July 1, 2002. Through this process, those companies would have received new primary state registration numbers. The original registration dates and numbers for those companies also show up in this section. 

Whether the company was registered before or after July 2002 can be determined by the structure of this section of the report. If the company was registered after the July 2002 changes, the section will appear as follows:

 If the company was registered prior to the July 2002 changes, the section will also include the following data:

• In the first row (Способ образования) it will say that the company was incorporated before July 1, 2002 (Создание юридического лица до 01.07.2002).
• The section will also feature two additional rows:

 The date of registration prior to 01 July 2002 will be the original date of the company’s registration in Russia.

Liquidation (Сведения о прекращении) – if applicable

If this section is present in the file, the company is no longer active. This section is typically found on the second page of an EGRUL report and provides information about the way the company was liquidated as well as the date of liquidation.

Vocabulary:

Taxpayer registration details (Сведения об учете в налоговом органе)

This section contains information about the entity’s taxpayer identification number (INN)—the main number by which entities in Russia are identified—as well as the reason for registration code.

While the INN is crucial for identifying Russian entities, the reason for registration code should not be used for disambiguation. The code indicates the type of activity a company is engaged in, meaning multiple entities can have the same number. Moreover, when companies change their main activity type, this number does not change, so the information may be outdated.

Note that if the company was initially registered prior to 2002, these numbers will remain constant after re-registration.

Vocabulary:

Company capital (Сведения об уставном капитале (складочном капитале, уставном фонде, паевых взносах))

This section provides information about a company’s capital. It is most useful for LLCs, which are required to update this information whenever it changes. The information contained in this section for JSCs will likely be outdated, as it reflects only the amount of capital at the time of the company’s registration. The amount of total capital is reported in Russian rubles.

Vocabulary:

Official representative (Сведения о лице, имеющем право без доверенности действовать от имени юридического лица)

This section identifies the company or natural person who is the company’s formal representative. The official representative is usually a senior executive officer (a general manager or director), but there is no rule for this. A hospital, for example, could list its head doctor here. When the official representative is a natural person, the section will list the person’s full name, the type of position he or she holds, his or her personal INN, and the date he or she assumed the role.

A company’s official representative can also be another company. In this case, the section will feature that company’s full name, its INN, the date it assumed the role, and its position will be presented as “management company” (управляющая компания).

Vocabulary:

Shareholders (Сведения об учредителях (участниках) юридического лица)

This section of the report lists the company’s shareholders.  For an analyst, this section is most useful for LLCs, which are required to disclose any changes to their shareholders. JSCs, on the other hand, only disclose their shareholders at the time of the company’s founding, so the information reported in this section does not reflect any subsequent changes to the company’s shareholders.

For an LLC, the section lists the current shareholders’ names, INNs, amount of share capital held, and the start dates of those holdings.

Vocabulary:

Branch offices and representative offices (Сведения о филиалах и представительствах)

This section of the report provides information about the branch offices and representative offices of a Russian company, both domestically and abroad.

Branch offices and representative offices of Russian companies do not receive any individual identifiers, such as tax identification or primary state registration numbers. In some cases, they don’t even have names. The only differentiating feature is their address, which will be different from that of the parent company. Use the vocabulary from the address section above to navigate this part of the report.