Summary: No Right to Request, No Right to Receive
| Request sent to | Department of the Registrar of Companies and Official Receiver (Click here). |
| Outcome of request | Information refused. |
| Time taken to respond | 9 working days (no official deadline as there is no freedom of information law) |
| Reason for refusal |
No access to information law. |
On 28 August 2013, Access Info sent a request to the Department of the Register of Companies and Official Receiver of Cyprus. Cyprus doesn’t have a law on access to information that obliges it to respect citizens’ right to know and to answer their requests for information.
On 2 October 2013, we called the Department of the Register of Companies and Official Receiver to follow up on our request. We were transferred from one department to another but were unable to speak to anyone as they did not pick up the phone.
On 4 October Access Info tried to call again several times, with no success: again, nobody answered. The request was classified as Administrative Silence given the failure to provide an adequate and timely response.
However, on 10 October, we received an email from the Register of Companies which simply stated:
“Policy of our Office is to not give the information/data contained in the Companies Register”
This means that the information was in fact refused, but since Cyprus is one of the only two countries (the other is Luxembourg) in the European Union that has no access to information law, we had no legal mechanism through which to appeal the denial, and so the request process was closed.
Accessing the Cypriot Company Register
| Information Available (for free) | The only information that is available for free is the company’s name and address, and sometimes the names of employees and their positions. |
| Provision for public access | There are 272,592 companies registered in Cyprus.Any person may verify through the internet whether or not a particular company is registered with the Department registries even though he/she is not a holder of an account with the Department.However, you must know what you are looking for, as it is not possible to do a blank search. |
| Cost per record | To access more information about a company, you must pay 10 EUR per record.Certified copies of the following documents cost:
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| Cost for whole database | It is not possible to download the whole database. |