The SEE Regional Business Registries Portal - BIFIDEX (www.bifidex.com) was presented at the Kopaonik Business Forum by the EBRD Regional Director for the Western Balkans, Ms Zsuzsanna Hargitai, and the Director of the Serbian Business Registers Agency, Mr. Milan Lučić.
Ms Hargitai has stressed that the EBRD supports the improvement of the business environment and regional integration of the Western Balkans, emphasizing that the Project on the SEE Regional Business Registries Portal represents a concrete and practical tool in this respect. It provides access to the official information on business entities from the entire region, which is made available at one place. Thus, the Portal contributes to the presentation of the region as a single investment destination. She has added that this practical tool supports and further promotes the regional cooperation, contributing to better information sharing, higher degree of legal certainty, market confidence, competitiveness and better economic understanding of the region.
The Director of the Serbian Business Registers Agency, Mr. Milan Lučić, has pointed out that data of the three largest business registries in the Western Balkans, i.e. the Serbian, North Macedonian and Albanian business registration authorities, has been already made available through the BIFIDEX Portal.
He has specified that the Portal offers data on about 1.4 million registered legal entities, of which 700,000 are active, 650,000 are dissolved and 50,000 are inactive, emphasizing that accessibility of data on inactive and dissolved entities is very important in the light of transparency, as the availability of historical overview could sometimes be more significant than the availability of data on active companies.
“Our aim is that other business registration authorities in the Western Balkans region join the Portal in one year's time, when the Portal will be containing data on over 2 million legal entities and 3 million natural persons."
Mr. Lučić has announced that data of the Republika Srpska should be uploaded to the Portal in a month’s time, while data of Montenegro will be integrated by the middle of this year. It is expected that Kosovo* and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina will also join the Portal.
The SBRA Director, who is currently holding the office of the President of the BIFIDEX Management Board, has pointed out that Croatia and Slovenia are also interested in the Project, whose representatives attend all the workshops on the Portal and constantly follow up its development.
* This designation is without prejudice to positions on status, and is in line with UNSC 1244 and the ICJ Opinion on the Kosovo Declaration of Independence.