How-To’s

How to Find Company Information in the Balkans

Illustration. Photo: Unsplush/NordWood Themes
A step-by-step guide through the labyrinths of business registries in several Balkan countries.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

The front page of the Registers of Business Entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: Screenshot

https://bizreg.pravosudje.ba/

This page provides a searchable database of available electronic court registers of business entities in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republika Srpska and the District of Brcko.

The electronic court registers contain information on all business/legal entities that are required to register by the Laws on Registration of Business Entities.

You can search by the name of the business entity, the registration number, abbreviation of the business entity and even a founder of the business entity.

There are even more options if you go with the advanced search option.
However, the information you get is limited: just the basic information about founders, board of managers, branch offices and subsidiaries.

If you need to find specific information on a company from Republika Srpska, you’d get better results if you go to http://bizreg.esrpska.com/Home/PretragaPoslovnogSubjekta.

Bulgaria

The front page of the Bulgarian business registry. Photo: Screenshot

http://www.brra.bg

The Bulgarian registry is extremely useful and has lots and lots of information. If you can’t read Bulgarian, go to http://www.brra.bg choose English language in the upper right corner, and click on the link, “By natural person or legal entity”. 

You need to enter the search terms in Bulgarian cyrilic, or, if you have this information, the company numbers or personal numbers of directors and owners.

Once you’re in, you have access to all company documents, even historic ones, acts of establishment, information on beneficial owners, etc. 

Croatia

The front page of the Croatian business registry. Photo: Screenshot

https://sudreg.pravosudje.hr/registar

There’s no English version and only the basic search is available. You can search by the name of the business entity, the registration number of the subject of entry, personal identification number, but not by the founder or owner of the business entity.

However, in the search results, you have a link to all the related companies, which is useful if you want to check where else the person appears. 

In the results, you’ll find shareholders’ names, addresses, financial reports, amount of share capital, subject of business, the status of the entity, the competent court for the entity, the name of the authorized representative, information on the founding acts and the statute of the entity.

If you need the company’s financial reports for the given year, you’ll find them here http://rgfi.fina.hr 

There you have an English version. You need to register with an email address. The registration is free, just insert your chosen username and email address and they’ll send you the password you need to use to login. 

Kosovo

The front page of the Kosovo’s business registry. Photo: Screenshot

https://arbk.rks-gov.net/

Searches are available in Albanian, Serbian and English and it’s pretty straightforward. Put the name of the company in the appropriate field and you’ll get the owner, the authorized person, registration date, and its capital. 

If you know the personal ID number of the person you’re interested in, you can search through all of their companies. 

Montenegro

The front page of the business registry in Montenegro. Photo: Screenshot

http://www.pretraga.crps.me:8083/

You can only search in Montenegrin and there’s no way to reach it through Google Translate.

With advanced search, you can search owners and directors names, personal numbers, contact data, what kind of business they are registered for, date of establishment, and changes that happened in the company.

For financial reports, you’ll find them at https://eprijava.tax.gov.me/TaxisPortal 

That search is also only in Montenegrin and you can’t reach it through Google Translate. 

Moldova

The Moldovan business search web-page has been under construction for a long time. Photo: Screenshot

http://webinfo.cis.gov.md/company-search

Good luck with finding company info in Moldova. The registry’s website has been under construction for months and the only way to find any info now is to go personally to the State Registration Chamber’s desk and pay for the information. 

The chamber will provide you with up-to-date official and complete info about a company.  Financial reports are not available. 

There are two useful independent websites, https://idno.md/ and https://www.bizzer.md/ where you can search for company data for free. This is not official information, so we can’t vouch for whether it is up-to-date. You can get the ownership, the date of registration and the physical address of the company.

Serbia

The front page of the Serbian Business Registry. Photo: Screenshot

http://pretraga2.apr.gov.rs/unifiedentitysearch

There is an English version of the homepage and parts of the website that do not have search parts. Databases themselves are only in Serbian. 

You can search by the registration number or name of the company. 

There’s no option to search by the names of the people involved.  

Once you get to the search, you’re provided with two search boxes. One says “Матични број”, which is the registration number – an eight digit number associated with the company. 

The other box is labeled “Пословно име”, where you can put the name of the company, if you want to do a search that way. 

Either way, you’ll get a great amount of data – owners’ names, directors, their personal numbers, contact data, capital, branches, beneficial owners (sometimes true, sometimes not), financial reports since 2016, and every change that happened in the company in the last couple of years. 

You can also obtain the original documents used to establish a company, including passport copies, off-shore information, etc. 

However, all the information is in Serbian. 

Searches by the names of people involved are available on commercial databases, such as poslovna.rs or checkpoint.rs.

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