This article is the conversation we have with foreign founders, CFOs, and corporate counsel who arrive at our Minsk office having already chosen Belarus and now need to pick the form. Our practice leans toward LLC engagements simply because the LLC is the right answer for most readers — that bias is real and worth […]
Short answer: for most foreign owners of a clean operating business in Belarus, a share sale is faster, cheaper on tax, and easier on the buyer than an asset sale. There are real exceptions to that, though — and one of them, the 2024 suspension of treaty benefits for sellers in “unfriendly” jurisdictions, has changed […]
You have a Belarusian LLC. The accounting is set up, the bank account is open, and the team is starting to ramp. Sooner or later — usually sooner — somebody on the call mentions HTP, and the room divides between people who understand exactly what that means and people who do not. The first group […]
You registered your Belarusian company in two days. From day one of operations, you are on the clock for filings — and the country has rules that don’t always look like what you are used to. Two parallel reporting streams, mandatory Russian-language documentation, fixed deadlines that the tax authority does not negotiate, and a real […]
If you have landed on this page, chances are you are weighing your options for setting up shop in Belarus and you keep running into the same three terms: subsidiary, branch, representative office. They sound similar. They are not. Pick the wrong one and you will spend the next year unwinding it. This guide walks […]
Short answer: almost any adult can be the director of a Belarusian company, including a foreigner. The director doesn’t have to be a Belarusian citizen. They don’t have to own the company. They often don’t even need to live in Belarus. Three things trip foreign founders up, though. One of them — the work permit […]
Here’s something that surprises most people looking at Eastern Europe for the first time: registering a company in Belarus costs around €10 in state fees. The process, if everything is in order, takes one to two business days. That’s not a typo, and it’s not a special deal — that’s just how it works. The […]
Tax is usually the last thing investors think about when they’re looking at Belarus. Registration fees, timelines, whether you need a local partner — those questions come first. By the time someone asks about the tax picture, they’ve sometimes already decided on a structure that limits their options. That’s the wrong order, and it costs […]
Yes. A foreigner can own 100% of a Belarusian company. No Belarusian partner. No government stake. No mandatory local shareholder hiding somewhere in the charter. It’s a reasonable question to want confirmed, because plenty of countries in this part of the world don’t work that way — and investors who’ve looked at Ukraine, Kazakhstan, or […]
The registration itself takes one business day. Submit before 13:00 and the certificate comes out the same day. Submit after 13:00 and it’s the next morning. That part is genuinely fast — faster than most countries in the region. The realistic end-to-end timeline for a foreign founder is 3 to 6 weeks. Nearly all of […]
You’ve registered the company. Now nothing moves until the bank account is open — no incoming payments, no payroll, no settling with suppliers. For foreign founders, this step is usually harder than the registration itself. Not dramatically harder, but less predictable. Each bank makes its own compliance call, and not every bank is the right […]
