Russia Companies: Owners Behind the Business

Analysis

What this data actually tells you about Russia

Russia’s company register is EGRUL (Unified State Register of Legal Entities), administered by the Federal Tax Service (FNS), which assigns every entity a 13-digit OGRN number on incorporation. As of January 1, 2025, EGRUL held 3,232,477 legal entities, of which 2,623,091 were commercial organizations; 2025 saw 173,100 new registrations against 239,000 closures, a 14.3% increase in closures versus 2024, leaving the active commercial-organization count down 2.4% for the year. Russia has no public beneficial-ownership register: Federal Law 215-FZ (2016) requires companies to identify and maintain records on individuals holding more than 25% ownership or control, but this information is produced only on request to authorities such as Rosfinmonitoring, not filed to any public database. Russia’s SME population is tracked via the Unified Register of SMEs (rmsp.nalog.ru), which held approximately 6.5-7 million subjects as of early-to-mid 2025; within that register, micro-enterprises represent roughly 96% of all registered subjects, small enterprises 3.7%, and medium enterprises 0.3% — the genuine FNS/Rosstat-register size-class shape, not an EU-style four-tier structure.

Russia was suspended from FATF membership on February 24, 2023 — the first membership suspension in FATF’s history — and this suspension remained unchanged through the most recent confirmable reporting. Foreign direct investment has contracted substantially on both monetary and entity-count measures: accumulated inward FDI stock fell from $497.7 billion at the start of 2022 to $216 billion by January 2025 (Central Bank of Russia data), while the number of Russian-registered legal entities with foreign participation fell 34% over three years, from 29,220 in March 2021 to 19,290 in March 2024 — though reporting from the first five months of 2026 shows 3,100 new foreign-participation company registrations, the highest for that period in eight years, suggesting a partial reorientation toward investors from other jurisdictions. Foreign companies from countries on Russia’s "unfriendly countries" list (formally designated by government order in March 2022) face specific transactional constraints: exits require Government Commission approval and, as tightened in October 2024, a minimum 60% discount to independently assessed market value plus a 35% exit levy, while dividend payments to unfriendly-country parents are capped at 50% of prior-year net profit. Separately, a parallel-import mechanism legalized under Federal Law 46-FZ and Government Resolution 506 (both 2022) permits import of specific goods/brands identified by the Ministry of Industry and Trade without the original trademark holder’s consent, with an estimated $70 billion in goods entering Russia under this regime in 2022-2023.