Support of purchase and sale of a shelf company: legal services for business

In September 2019, our firm received a request from a Client who wanted to buy a ready-made health business. They needed help in re-registration of the company for him/her and his/her partners. Besides, he/she wanted to be overcautious and learn as much as possible about the company he/she was buying.

This is not the only case in our practice, since we provide legal support services for business. Therefore, we decided to write material that would answer the basic questions that arise in the process of buying and selling a business.

To provide the Client with the full amount of necessary information and quickly achieve his/her goal of purchasing a ready-made business, we took the following steps.

Vetting the company prior to the purchase

Our experts, thinking that the Client  would be most interested in knowing whether the license for medical practice was valid, tried to quickly get all the necessary information from the licensing authority.

After all, there was no hard copy of the license, and all information was stored on the website of the Ministry of Health. And if the license were obtained no less than a year before or more, it would be quite difficult to find an order to issue it among a heap of other.

Also, before starting the procedure for buying a company and re-registering it, we checked to see if the company was in the register of debtors, in the register of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine (SFS) on the presence of tax debt and in other registers where the presence of a legal entity was undesirable.

Report Submission Check

Unfortunately, there is no other way to check whether reports have been submitted, except to ask the seller to provide copies of such reports with a mark from the tax and statistical offices. And if reports were submitted in electronic form and the company has the issued electronic keys - all information should be in the appropriate database.

But if the company has not carried out business activities during the year, it is not necessary to submit blank tax reports. Therefore, even if no reports were submitted, the new owner of the company runs absolutely no risk.

Company re-registration

Any complete re-registration of the company from one owner’s name to another consists of three main stages:

• Signing documents with a notary;
• registration of changes in the composition of participants;
• registration of a change of director, a new revision of the charter of the company, as well as all other related changes, at the request of new members (for example, change of address, phone number, name).

Having more than ten years of experience in accompanying the transfer of corporate rights, our specialists prepared the necessary documents, arranged for signing them by a notary, and carried out all actions at the state registrar.

If you want to buy a ready-made business and need help in this matter or service for setting up a new business, you can contact our staff for details of cooperation.