On 14 December 2020, the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine in association with the OSCE Project Coordinator in Ukraine, considering the provisions of the EU Directives 2015/849 and 2018/843 on strengthening the requirements for the beneficial ownership transparency, taking account of both domestic legislation and leading international practices, released the Guidelines on Disclosure of Information on Ultimate Beneficial Owners (‘UBO’s).
The guidelines are devoted to the following matters:
- Analysis of international standards and foreign countries’ experience regarding the UBO identification procedure;
- Analysis of the general situation, terminology and legislative framework within the context of the UBO institute;
- Analysis of specifics of the UBO information disclosure requirements as applied to different types of legal entities.
The guidelines were elaborated with the aim of creating effective mechanism of UBOs identification and verification. Meanwhile, it remains unclear whether such guidelines will serve for purely information and recommendation purposes or will be made mandatorily applicable by financial monitoring subjects.
We recall that on 28 April 2020, the Law of Ukraine "On Prevention and Counteraction to Legalization (Laundering) of the Criminal Proceeds, Terrorist Financing and Financing of Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction" (the ‘Law’) came into force, which provides, among other things, for mandatory disclosure requirements with respect to the information on UBOs in Ukrainian legal entities.
Particularly, the Law requires that all existing Ukrainian legal entities submit to the state registrar the documents disclosing their ownership structure and UBOs and keep the relevant information up to date on annual basis.
The initial filing was supposed to be made within a three-month period after the date of the relevant regulation approving the form of the ownership structure to be submitted has been adopted, which was supposed to occur not later than 28 June 2020. Still, as of now, such from has not been approved yet.
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NAZALI TAX & LEGAL |