Monaco Company & Beneficial Ownership Directory

Analysis

What this data actually tells you about Monaco

Monaco’s central company register, the Répertoire du Commerce et de l’Industrie (RCI), is administered by the Direction de l’Expansion Économique, and the Institut Monégasque de la Statistique et des Études Économiques (IMSEE) counted 7,175 active enterprises as of February 22, 2024. Entities must register within one month of receiving business authorisation, and registration triggers ongoing obligations including designating an information officer and maintaining a shareholder register. Monaco’s economic structure reflects a genuinely distinctive set of historical agreements with France: personal income tax has not applied to Monegasque residents since an 1869 ordinance of Prince Charles III, with French nationals resident in Monaco taxed under a bilateral convention signed May 18, 1963 (part of a package resolving the 1962-63 Franco-Monegasque diplomatic crisis, during which France closed the border on October 13, 1962); Monaco has been part of the EU customs territory via its customs union with France since 1968; and Monaco uses the euro under a Monetary Convention with the EU, most recently revised November 29, 2011, entitled to mint its own euro coins (capped at 1/500th of France’s annual mintage) since 2002.

Monaco’s beneficial-ownership register, created under Law No. 1.362 of August 3, 2009 and expanded by Law No. 1.462 of June 28, 2018, is annexed to the RCI but is not publicly accessible — access is limited to Monegasque authorities, authorised tax-service agents, and third parties who demonstrate a legitimate AML/CFT-related interest and obtain authorisation from the President of the Court. Monaco’s compliance history carries a genuinely major, current story worth stating plainly: the FATF placed Monaco under increased monitoring (the “grey list”) on June 28, 2024, citing insufficient action against money laundering linked to foreign fraud, weak asset seizure abroad, insufficiently dissuasive AML/CFT sanctions, and gaps in suspicious-transaction-report quality, judicial efficiency, and investigative resourcing. Monaco has since made real, verifiable progress — MONEYVAL recognised compliance with 39 of 40 FATF recommendations by December 2024, and the FATF’s June 2026 plenary found Monaco’s remediation action plan “substantially completed” — but Monaco remained on the grey list as of that most recent reporting, still awaiting the mandatory on-site assessment visit required before formal removal.