How to find UBO in Poland? 2022 Guide
This article tells you how to find UBO of a Polish company using the Central Ultimate Beneficial Owner Register of Poland, and what other business registers to check if there’s no information about it in an official database.
Who is the ultimate beneficial owner? Definition of UBO in Poland
Ultimate beneficial owner of a company in Poland is a natural person or persons who owns or controls a given company and natural persons on behalf of whom business activity is conducted. On their behalf relationships or an occasional transaction are established. UBO is a person who:
- is the owner of at least 25 percent of the shares in the company;
- manages the operational and financial policy of the company;
- fulfills the criteria of domination written in the Act on Accounting;
- when none of the above criteria can be met, a person in a senior management position is considered a UBO.
Polish Ultimate Beneficial Owners Register (CRBR)
The Ultimate Beneficial Owner Register — Centralny Rejestr Beneficjentów Rzeczywistych or shortly CRBR — is operating since October 13, 2019. This register is open and free, which means that everyone can verify who exactly is UBO in a given Polish company. It is worth mentioning here that this ultimate beneficial owner register is available only in Polish, so all the documents and interface you must translate.
The Ultimate Beneficial Owner Register of Poland you can find here:
Which companies in Poland must report UBO to CRBR?
You might be surprised, but not all Polish companies are subject to the Ultimate Beneficial Owner Register of Poland, CRBR. This obligation applies only to this entities:
- limited companies (pol. spółka z ograniczoną odpowiedzialnością)
- joint-stock companies (pol. spółka akcyjna)
- limited partnerships (pol. spółka komandytowa)
- joint-stock partnership companies (pol. spółka komandytowo-akcyjna)
- unlimited companies (pol. spółka jawna)
- simple joint-stock companies (pol. prosta spółka akcyjna)
- partnership companies (pol. spółki partnerskie)
- foundations (pol. fundacje)
- associations registered in the National Court Register (pol. stowarzyszenia zarejestrowane w Krajowym Rejestrze Sądowym)
- european economic interest groupings (pol. europejskie zgrupowania interesów gospodarczych)
- european companies (pol. spółki europejskie)
- cooperatives (pol. spółdzielnie)
- european cooperatives (pol. spółdzielnie europejskie)
- trusts — trust founder, trustee, trust supervisor (if appointed), the actual owner collecting the benefits, another person exercising control over the trust
Therefore, the obligation to register UBO applies to entities that are required to register in the Polish National Court Register (pol. Krajowy Rejestr Sądowy). This does not apply, for example, to sole proprietorships, which are registered in another Polish business register CEIDG.
How to verify UBO in Poland in CRBR? Quick guide
Step 1
Enter the UBO Register website: https://crbr.podatki.gov.pl/adcrbr/#/ then click ‘Wyszukaj’, which means ‘Search’:
Step 2
To search for an entity, enter the Polish tax identification number (NIP number) or trust ID (pol. identyfikator trustu). If you want to search for a specific Polish UBO click ‘Wyszukiwanie Beneficjenta po PESEL’ then enter the PESEL number of a natural person. If a person you want to verify does not have a PESEL number, then select the third possible search option, ‘Wyszukiwanie Beneficjenta po dacie urodzenia’, and then enter the date of birth of the UBO. After that click ‘Wyszukaj’.
Step 3
If the entity submitted UBO to CRBR, you will receive the following result:
Search results with all the information about UBOs of Polish company can be downloaded in PDF (button ‘Pobierz plik PDF’) or XML format (button ‘Pobierz plik XML’).
If a given entity has not reported ultimate beneficial owner to the CRBR, the following message will appear: ‘Brak wpisów w Centralnym Rejestrze Beneficjentów Rzeczywistych’ which means: ‘There are no entries in The Ultimate Beneficial Owner Register’.
How many Polish companies have reported their ultimate beneficial owners to CRBR so far? As of June 2022
Due to the fact that in Transparent Data we supply AML Compliance departments in UBO API R and AML API, we have a quick insight into how large the base of the Polish CRBR register is.
To date (as of June 2022) there are over 658 thousand active polish companies that, according to law, should notify their ultimate beneficial owner to the CRBR. So far, almost 486 thousand companies in Poland have fulfilled this obligation.
This means that almost 173 thousand Polish companies still haven’t declared their ultimate beneficial owners in the CRBR register. If the company does not report the UBO to the CRBR register on time, it may be fined PLN 1 million (EUR 22,000).
Newly registered Polish companies have to report their ultimate beneficial owners to the CRBR register within 7 days. Companies have the same amount of time to update information about their UBO’s in case of any changes in this regard.
How to check who is UBO if there is no such data in CRBR? Check KRS and CEIDG
Unfortunately, Polish companies do not always report their ultimate beneficials owners to the CRBR, although they are obliged to do so. In such a situation, in order to identify the company’s UBO, it is necessary to analyze the ownership structure of the company.
Information on the company’s ownership structure can be found in the Polish National Court Register (pol. Krajowy Rejestr Sądowy or shortly KRS) and for sole proprietorships in the Central Registration and Information on Business (pol. Centralna Ewidencja Działalności Gospodarczej or shortly CEIDG).
The analysis of the ownership structure of the Polish companies is sometimes a difficult task which, in the case of designating the UBO, may not actually bring any results. There are companies in Poland that have a very complicated network of capital and personal ties. This means that in order to “manually” identify the UBO, all links have to be analyzed.
Such verification manually takes a long time — it is an ineffective task without an appropriate tool. That’s why our Polish UBO API gives returns information not only from CRBR, but also — in cases when there’s no information in UBO Register — from KRS & CEIDG databases. Our algorithm mentions all the company ownwers that have min. 25% share.
