Largest Latvia Companies

Analysis

What this data actually tells you about Latvia

Latvia’s central company register, the Register of Enterprises of the Republic of Latvia (Uzņēmumu reģistrs, UR), operates under the Ministry of Justice, with online registration and filing available through registrs.ur.gov.lv and the state-services gateway latvija.lv using a qualified e-signature (eParaksts, eID, Smart-ID, or another eIDAS-recognised method); registration typically completes within one to three business days once documents are filed, including for non-residents who can register remotely without a physical presence in Latvia. Registry-data aggregator Kyckr reported over 178,000 registered entities as of August 2025, including more than 128,000 corporations and 29,000 sole proprietorships. Latvia’s financial-sector regulator was consolidated on January 1, 2023, when the former Financial and Capital Market Commission (FKTK) was fully integrated into Latvijas Banka, the central bank, which now performs supervision and resolution-authority functions directly — part of a broader post-2018 overhaul of Latvia’s financial-sector oversight following the collapse of ABLV Bank, whose licence was pulled in 2018 after the US Treasury’s FinCEN named it a bank “of primary money-laundering concern,” and after which non-resident depositor funds in the Latvian banking system fell from €12.4 billion in 2015 to €3.2 billion in 2018 as Latvia overhauled its AML/CFT regime under MONEYVAL oversight. Latvia’s economy also remains unusually open to foreign capital by EU standards: foreign-controlled enterprises generated 19.5% of national value added between 2018 and 2020 (versus a 13.3% EU average), and FDI stock reached €26.3 billion by the end of 2024, 85% of it EU-origin, with Sweden alone accounting for 31.1% of the total.

Latvia’s approach to ownership-data transparency is more nuanced than a simple before-and-after story. After the Court of Justice of the EU’s November 22, 2022 ruling invalidated unconditional public access to beneficial-ownership registers, Latvia was among the minority of EU states that kept its register publicly accessible rather than restricting it, and Latvia was not among the 11 member states the European Commission named in its September 2025 infringement action over incomplete 6th AML Directive transposition. That openness has since faced its own legal challenge, however: in a judgment delivered September 3, 2026 (Case C-798/24), the CJEU ruled — in a case referred by Latvia’s own Constitutional Court after a challenge from minority shareholders — that Latvia’s practice of publishing public limited liability companies’ full shareholder data (names, personal ID numbers, addresses, and shareholdings) online in bulk to any unidentified user violates the GDPR, since neither EU company law nor a transparency objective justifies unconditional bulk disclosure without a legitimate-interest test or safeguards against scraping. The ruling concerns Latvia’s separate public shareholder register for AS companies under the Companies Register Law rather than the AML beneficial-ownership register specifically, but follows the same reasoning as the 2022 ruling and is likely to push Latvia toward the access-gated model most EU peers have already adopted.