Loading…
Georgia requires companies to identify ultimate beneficial owners — natural persons owning 25% or more, or exercising effective control. GE360 maps the full UBO chain by traversing multilevel shareholding and nominee relationships in the Georgian registry.
Last reviewed: 2026-07-10
An ultimate beneficial owner (UBO) is a natural person who ultimately owns or controls a legal entity. Under Georgian anti-money-laundering and beneficial ownership rules (codified in national law and available on matsne.gov.ge), a UBO is generally defined as an individual who: (a) directly or indirectly holds 25% or more of the shares or voting rights, or (b) exercises effective control through other means — for example, through contractual arrangements or the right to appoint or remove directors.
Georgian law requires companies to identify and declare their UBOs to NAPR. The declared UBO information becomes part of the company's public registry record. This requirement aligns with international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) anti-money-laundering standards, which Georgia has committed to implementing.
However, declared UBOs in the registry reflect what companies have chosen to disclose. Independent verification — tracing ownership through each layer of intermediate companies — is essential for robust due diligence.
UBO declarations are filed with NAPR and form part of the company's public registry record. They are visible in the registry extract (ამონაწერი) under the beneficial ownership section. NAPR's online portal allows free searching of this information.
In addition to the formal UBO declaration, NAPR holds the complete shareholding structure of each company — the names, IDs, and ownership percentages of all founders (მეწილეები, participants). Tracing ownership beyond the first layer requires looking up each corporate shareholder in turn.
For entities with complex ownership structures — chains of holding companies, trusts, or foreign intermediaries — the NAPR portal requires manual, multi-step searches. GE360 automates this by pre-computing the ownership graph across all 819,283 registered businesses [GE360 registry data, 2026].
To manually trace a UBO chain: (1) On napr.gov.ge, find the target company and note all founders. (2) For each corporate founder, search for that company and record its founders in turn. (3) Repeat until all ownership paths terminate in natural persons. (4) Calculate the effective ownership percentage at each level (multiply percentages along the chain).
This process is straightforward for two-layer structures but quickly becomes complex with three or more levels. A chain of five companies each owned 51% by the next means the ultimate natural person owns only 51%^5 ≈ 3.5% — well below the 25% threshold — yet effectively controls the entire chain.
GE360 pre-computes these chains and displays the full UBO path on the investigation board. Search for a company at /search and open the Board view to see the ownership graph with all intermediate entities highlighted. See also the Georgian company registry guide.
Several legal structures commonly obscure UBO in Georgia: (1) Chains of LLCs where each company is owned by the next, with the ultimate beneficial owner appearing only at layer five or six; (2) Nominee shareholders — persons who hold shares on behalf of the true beneficial owner under a private agreement that does not appear in the registry; (3) Foreign intermediate companies (particularly from free-trade-zone jurisdictions) whose ownership is not publicly available; (4) Mixed structures using both Georgian and foreign entities.
Nominee arrangements are not specifically prohibited under Georgian law but may trigger legal risks in AML/KYC compliance contexts. When a company's declared shareholders are themselves companies with opaque ownership, treat this as a due diligence red flag requiring enhanced scrutiny.
GE360 builds a comprehensive graph of corporate ownership by loading all founder-company relationships from the NAPR registry and computing paths through the graph. The investigation board visually represents companies as nodes and ownership relationships as directed edges, with edge weights showing ownership percentages.
For each company dossier, GE360 displays: the immediate founders (with their ownership %), the companies in which the subject holds shares (upstream), and the full UBO path if it terminates in natural persons. Where ownership paths lead to foreign entities or opaque intermediaries, GE360 flags the chain as 'partially traceable'.
GE360 is an independent aggregator and is not a government service. Its UBO mapping reflects the data in official Georgian registries — it cannot trace ownership held through offshore structures whose information is not publicly available in Georgia. For enhanced UBO research on foreign entities, combine GE360 with commercial databases covering offshore registries.
Georgian anti-money-laundering and beneficial ownership rules set the UBO threshold at 25% direct or indirect ownership, or effective control through other means. A person owning exactly 24% would not be declared as a UBO under this rule, though enhanced due diligence is still warranted.
Yes. UBO declarations filed with NAPR are part of the public registry and are accessible on napr.gov.ge. This makes Georgia more transparent than many jurisdictions where UBO registers are not public.
Foreign nationals appearing as founders or UBOs are recorded in the NAPR registry with their passport or national ID number (as declared). GE360 displays this information in the dossier. Cross-checking against international sanctions lists must be done separately.
Circular ownership (Company A owns Company B which owns Company A) is legally unusual in Georgia but can appear in the data due to data quality issues. GE360 detects and flags circular paths to prevent infinite traversal and highlights them as data anomalies.
A nominee shareholder holds shares on behalf of the actual beneficial owner under a private agreement. The nominee appears in NAPR as the registered owner, while the true owner is not visible in the registry. Nominee arrangements are a known UBO obfuscation technique and should trigger enhanced due diligence.
The relevant provisions are in the Law of Georgia on Entrepreneurs and the Anti-Money Laundering Law. Both are available in official consolidated form on matsne.gov.ge, Georgia's official legislative database.