The Council of Ministers, with its decision made on 16^th December 2020, has decided to appoint the Company’s Registrar & Official Receiver of the Republic of Cyprus as the competent authority for the upkeeping and maintenance of the register of ultimate beneficial owners of companies and other legal entities.

By this decision, the Company’s Registrar and Official Receiver is authorized to collect information about the ultimate beneficiaries of companies and other legal entities through an intermediary platform that has been created.

Based on the above, the Company’s Registrar has announced that the commencement of data collection is set to the 18^th January 2021.

From this date, entities will be granted a period of 6 months (until 19/07/21) to register all the relevant information regarding their ultimate beneficial owners.

However, it should be stressed that the intermediary system that has been created is only accessible by competent authorities upon a formal request to the Company’s Registrar.

The data collected will be transferred to the final platform solution, that will be developed in the second half of 2021, and access to it will be based on the provisions of the 5^th European Directive (EU 2018/843) of the European Parliament and Council of 30 May 2018, concerning the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing.

Cyprus has not yet transposed the 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD5) into national law. However, this is expected to happen during 2021.