Luxembourg's Ministry of Justice has announced that 105,622 entities have registered their beneficial owners to date, thus representing 75.76% of the targeted entities.
On 1 September 2019, after the end of the transitional period provided for by law, 46.93% of the entities covered by the law had registered their beneficial owners in the Register of Beneficial Owners. However, 25,025 requests were still being processed at this time due to the massive influx of applications in the last week of August.
Due to this huge influx of registration requests at the end of the transitional period, the Register of Beneficial Owners informed users that they were granted an additional administrative period of three months (until the end of November) during which registration would continue to be free of charge.
At the end of the extension of the registration period, the situation is as follows: to date, 105,622 (75.76%) entities have registered their beneficial owners. Taking into account non-active entities (those that have not made a deposit for more than ten years in the Luxembourg Business Registers), 87% of active entities have made the required registrations. This rate is considered very high for a newly created register, especially in comparison with the registration rate of other countries.
The Luxembourg Business Registers (LBR) will send a list of entities having not yet complied with the law to the Public Prosecutor's Office. These entities may, however, at any time comply with the law by making the required registrations.
In addition, from January 2020, the LBR will initiate the procedure of article 18 of the grand-ducal regulation of 19 December 2003, implementing the law on the Trade and Companies Register which allows the automatic deletion from the register of legal and other entities for which no deposit has been made for ten years. This would remove all inactive entities from the Register of Beneficial Owners. This administrative deletion currently applies to 18,508. The entities concerned will be informed in advance and may present their observations and / or regularise their situation. At a later stage, these entities may be the subject of an administrative dissolution measure without liquidation provided for in the framework of the draft law 6539 on the preservation of companies and modernising the law of bankruptcy.
