Overview, definitions, thresholds

In 2017, the Act on the Register of Public Sector Partners (ARPSP) entered into force in Slovakia. It covers entities benefiting from public funding or conducting business with the state, so-called ‘Partners of Public Sector’. Data is collected by the Ministry of Justice of the Slovak Republic in the ‘Register partnerov verejného sektora’ (RPVS), which is free to use and public. This is the data which is available on the OpenOwnership register.

Following an amendment of the Anti-money Laundering Act, and under the amendments to the Commercial Register Act, all companies are now obliged to register their beneficial owners to the Commercial Register by 31 December 2019. Unlike the RPVS, the data will not be made public and access will be limited to persons and authorities provided for by law.

Direct and indirect ownership

Slovak companies and foreign companies operating in Slovakia have to report beneficial owners (‘Konečného užívateľa výhod’) who directly and indirectly control a company. Beneficial owners can be Slovak or foreign natural persons. Declarations to the RPVS must be done via an ‘authorized person’, who must be either an attorney, notary, bank, auditor or a tax advisor.

A beneficial owner is a natural person who:

  • holds (directly or indirectly) at least 25% of the voting rights or a 25% share in the registered capital of the legal entity
  • has the right to appoint or recall a statutory/executive/supervisory body of the legal entity or any of its members
  • controls in practice a legal entity other than as described above
  • has at least a 25% share of the benefits from the legal entity’s business (dividends and similar payments)

If a beneficial owner’s interests are held indirectly through one or more legal entities (whether Slovak or foreign), they have to be declared.

This is because legal entities, such as companies and trusts, can never be beneficial owners, only natural persons can.

If there are no persons who meet the above criteria, members of senior management of the company are considered to be beneficial owners.

Exclusions and exemptions

In the RPVS, information regarding beneficial owners of all entities conducting business with the state have to be registered. There are no exemptions such as foreign entities acting through branch offices, non-profits or contractual partnerships. However since September 2019, any company owned directly or indirectly by a listed company (on a regulated market or a market with similar disclosure obligations in accordance with applicable EU regulation) only needs to report the executive directors and board members of this parent company.

In the Commercial Register, listed companies are exempt altogether.

Registration in the RPVS removes the obligation to register in the Commercial Register, however the opposite is not true.

Data availability and license

The RPVS data is publicly and freely available in two formats:

The RPVS Register data is licensed by statute.

Beneficial ownership data in Slovakia's Commercial Register is not yet available for public search.

Open Ownership ingests, maps and transforms the RPVS data in line with version 0.2 of our Beneficial Ownership Data Standard before making it available for anyone to reuse in a range of formats.

We also reconcile and enrich this using bulk data from OpenCorporates. These mappings are currently a work in progress and should be treated with caution. The dataset is published under the Open Data Commons Attribution License.