Setting up a company in Belarus is fast, and foreign owners who have done it often assume that closing one will be just as quick — a matter of a decision and a form. It is not. Winding a Belarusian company down is a slower, more exacting process than starting one up, driven by a […]
A Russian founder looking at Belarus usually approaches it with one of two assumptions, and it is worth unsettling both at the start. The first is that Belarus is more or less Russia — a near-identical neighbour where setting up must be trivial and the company will run on familiar rules. The second, more common […]
There comes a point with some companies when the sensible thing is to close them — a venture that did not work out, a subsidiary that has served its purpose, a dormant entity quietly costing more to keep than it returns. For a foreign owner, the tempting course at that point is the quiet one: […]
A foreign parent whose Belarusian High-Technology Park subsidiary has built something valuable — a platform, a codebase, a product — reaches a point where it wants the intellectual property “consolidated at the parent,” usually ahead of a financing round or a sale, and usually in the belief that moving IP inside its own group is […]
A foreign company that has set up in Belarus — through a local subsidiary or another registered entity — or begun selling into it, comes to register its brand expecting a formality — file the mark, pay the fee, receive the certificate — and instead meets a refusal on a ground it never saw coming. […]
A founder who has read up on the individual moving parts — how a power of attorney is legalized, whether a company should be an LLC or something else, why an electronic signature is not the shortcut it first appears — reaches the point of wanting the whole thing laid out in order. Not this […]
A foreign founder is ready to set up a Belarusian company without flying in, which is entirely possible, and how most of them do it. Someone tells them the mechanism: sign a power of attorney authorizing a Belarusian representative to handle the registration, get it apostilled, and send it over. So they find a notary, […]
A founder who has just worked out what it takes to send a power of attorney into Belarus — the notary, the apostille or legalisation, the courier, the translation on arrival — asks the obvious question of the age: surely all of that is unnecessary now, and the documents can simply be signed electronically from […]
A head office reading up on setting up in Belarus keeps meeting the same three abbreviations — LLC, CJSC, and the unitary enterprise, or PUE — and cannot tell from the general material whether choosing between them is a formality or a decision that will matter later. The honest position is that for most foreign […]
A foreign manufacturer has been selling into Belarus through an independent distributor for years, and the arrangement has run its course. They want their own people in-country. They want to invoice Belarusian customers directly instead of through a middleman taking a margin. Two advisers have told them to open a representative office, and someone has […]
A foreign company is going into business with a Belarusian partner. The local side brings the things that are hard to import — market access, a customer base, licences, premises, people who know how the sector works locally. The foreign side brings capital and technology. They have agreed the shape of it: the foreign investor […]
