Registering a company in Belarus is quick — a matter of a day once the documents are in order — and foreign founders who have just been through it often expect the bank account to follow at the same pace. Then the account takes weeks, and the contrast is jarring enough to feel like something […]
A foreign company deciding how to put roots down in Belarus usually starts with a practical question rather than a legal one: does the parent want a separate Belarusian company sitting under it, or does it want to operate in the country as itself? For years that question had a narrow answer. A foreign business […]
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 […]
