Representative and Branch office accreditation. General information. List of documents required from a foreign legal entity:

1. Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws of a foreign legal entity.

2. Certificate of Incorporation (charter) of a foreign legal entity or an extract from the Trade Register of the country of origin.

3. Bank reference verifying the foreign legal entity solvency, which is issued by the bank providing services for a foreign legal entity in the country of incorporation.

4. Resolution of a foreign legal entity on the Representative or Branch Office opening and the Head appointment.

5. Power of Attorney given to the Head of the Representative or Branch Office.

6. Certificate of registration with Tax authorities bearing the tax identification number of a foreign company.

Documents mentioned above require Consulate legalization or apostille with notarized translation to the Russian language.

Stages of accreditation	Stage Terms
1. Accreditation with the accreditation authority	14-21 working days
2. Producing the seal	2-5 working days
3. Registration at the State Committee for Statistics	2-5 working days
4. Registration at the State Tax Inspectorate	5-7working days
5. Registration at non-budgetary funds is done by tax inspectorate
6. Opening of a bank account	depends on the bank

Vocabulary Notes:

extract – выписка

Trade register – торговый регистр

Power of Attorney - доверенность на ведение дел

apostille – апостиль

Apostille is a French word which means a certification. It is commonly used in English to refer to the legalization of a document for international use under the terms of the 1961 Hague Convention Abolishing the Requirement for Legalization for Foreign Public Documents. Documents which have been notarized by a notary public, and certain other documents, and then certified with a conformant apostille are accepted for legal use in all the nations that have signed the Hague Convention.

In countries which are not signatories to the 1961 convention and do not recognize the apostille, a foreign public document must be legalized by a consular officer of the country from which the document

LETTER WRITING TASK

Your letter is an answer to the request from your foreign client who is going to start business in the Russian Federation.

Read attentively the information in the book pp. 104 – 105, which gives you the general idea of the procedure. Then read the additional text below providing facts.

Decide which of the entities your client is going to form – a company or a branch office.

Draft the letter providing information on

the laws regulating business registration and accreditation (you don’t have to mention all laws but chose the major laws to show the statutory authorization of the process;

the government body where legal entities must register;

the documents, which are necessary to obtain and submit;

the procedure stages and terms

offer your service and assistance in the process of registration or accreditation.

NOTE

You should not copy information from the text as it’s given there. Customize the information and write sentences (as you’ve done in Tasks after the texts of the Unit pp. 94-96).

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