Beneficial ownership disclosure in Latvia is not a single filing by the company. It is a chain of duties running from the individual, through the shareholder, to the board — and the sanction for breaking it falls hardest on the person who stays silent.
The information has to reach the company before anyone can file it
A Latvian company cannot declare a beneficial owner it does not know about, so the law builds a chain starting from the person themselves.
The individual comes first. Someone who has reason to believe they have become the beneficial owner of a Latvian company has to tell that company without delay. Anyone holding shares for someone else has to say so and name that person. Nominee arrangements are not a loophole here — the law catches them expressly, and the duty falls on the nominee personally.
The shareholder comes second, and this one surprises people. Under the Commercial Law a shareholder has to tell the company about the beneficial owner who exercises control through them — immediately, and no later than two weeks after the board asks.
The company comes third. If nothing arrives, or there is good reason to doubt what did, the company has to establish its beneficial owners on its own initiative. “Nobody told us” is not an answer it can record and leave.
Who has to be named
A beneficial owner is the person who owns or controls the company, or in whose interests a transaction is carried out. For a company, that is at least anyone who directly or indirectly holds more than 25 per cent of the capital or the votes, or who controls it some other way, directly or indirectly.
Two things about that do the work in practice. The 25 per cent is a floor, not a test: control by other means counts on its own, so someone below the threshold can still be a beneficial owner. And it reaches indirect holdings, so a chain through two or three companies does not break the analysis — it only makes it longer.
If you have used every available means, cannot identify any individual, and have ruled out that there is one, you may name a person from the management body instead. That is a last resort, not a convenience: the steps you took have to be reasoned and written down, and the grounds confirmed in the application itself.
What to file, and by when
| What happens | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Registering the company, or a change of shareholders or board | Stated in that application |
| You learn of a beneficial owner, or of a change | Without delay, no later than 14 days |
| The person through whom control runs loses that status | Without delay, no later than 14 days |
The third one is missed most often. A change in a company somewhere in the middle of the chain may not change who the ultimate beneficial owner is — but it still needs a filing, even where the answer is that nothing has changed.
What you have to hold and keep up to date: name; personal identity code or date of birth; identity document details; nationality or nationalities; country of permanent residence; and how control is exercised, together with the extent of that control, naming the person it runs through. Two of those — nationalities in the plural, and the extent of control — were added from 1 July 2026. If your record was last reviewed before that date, it probably holds less than the law now requires.
One narrow exemption: nothing is needed where the beneficial owner is a shareholder in a company listed on a regulated market and the control comes only from that.
What becomes public, and what does not
Anyone can obtain beneficial ownership information from the State Revenue Service and online from the Enterprise Register. But what the Register publishes as open data is narrower: name, part of the identity code or the month and year of birth, nationalities, country of residence and the Register's own identifier. Full identity document details and the documents proving control are not published.
Information about a beneficial owner under 18, or with limited legal capacity, is restricted automatically. Since 1 July 2026 there is a route for everyone else: if publicity could expose the owner or their family to a crime threatening life, health or property, and there is an objective reason to think it might happen, they can apply to the Register. It hides the information within one working day while it looks at the application, and decides within one month. If a threat is established the restriction lasts as long as the threat does, confirmed annually; if it is not, access is restored whether or not the decision is challenged.
Two more points. A person named as a beneficial owner gets a notice at their official electronic address — being named is not something that happens invisibly. And the information stays available for up to 10 years after the company is struck off.
When someone else challenges what you filed
Your record is not only checked by the Register. Banks, auditors, notaries and advocates look at it routinely, and where what they find does not match what is registered, they have their own duty to report the mismatch within three working days.
If the report says the information may be untrue, the Register puts a warning against the company within one working day, with no separate decision. It stays visible to other covered businesses, to law enforcement and to supervisors until it is removed.
So an out-of-date or wrong record does not stay a quiet administrative matter. It comes back as a flag on the public register rather than as a question in an email.
What happens if nobody files
The consequences come at three levels, and they reach the company as well as the shareholder.
Administrative. Failing to give the Enterprise Register required information or documents carries administrative liability, which applies to companies. Submitting false information is penalised too.
Criminal. The Criminal Law punishes failing to provide beneficial ownership information, and knowingly providing false information, with up to one year's imprisonment — up to two where substantial harm is caused — or another sanction. As written it also covers failing to provide the information to a company, which catches the individual and the nominee in the chain, not just the company's own filing.
Liquidation. The Register has liquidated companies that failed to disclose a beneficial owner — several hundred SIAs in a single year. This is the consequence that ends the company rather than fining it.
The silent shareholder also carries sanctions of their own, and they are not discretionary: no voting rights, votes not counted towards the quorum, and no dividends. There is a way out worth knowing in both directions — if the board has not filed what the shareholder gave it, the shareholder can file it with the Register themselves, and the restrictions stop once it is registered. An inactive board does not leave a shareholder stuck.