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Belgian Corporate Registry Records
18 May 2020
In Belgium, the Kruispuntbank van Ondernemingen (KBO) – also known as Banque-Carrefour des Entreprises in French or Crossroads Bank for Enterprises in English – is the official Belgian corporate registry database. Important company information is also provided in announcements published in the Belgian Gazette and the annual accounts deposited with the Belgian National Bank.
Information available in the Kruispuntbank van Ondernemingen
The information in the KBO database can be accessed online for free. It can be searched by company name, registration number, company activity, officially-licenced activity or registered address. The search and results interfaces are available in Dutch, French, German and English, making this highly accessible to an international audience.
Search results are presented in a table format and also include branch establishments:
Clicking through to a particular result will take you to the following screen:
Normally, the following information is available on companies:
- company name, including former names
- company number
- legal form (e.g. besloten vennootschap met beperkte aansprakelijkheid BVBA or naamloze vennootschap NV)
- company status (e.g. active, in liquidation, dissolved, undergoing bankruptcy etc.)
- registration date
- registered address
- company activities and licences
- directors, including their function and when they were appointed
The results screen also normally contains links to publications by the company in the official Belgian Gazette and to the annual accounts (if any) available in the Belgian National Bank’s Centrale des bilans database:
Limitations
There are three major limitations of the KBO database:
- Firstly, it does not include names and functions of former directors, nor does it provide identifying details for the company’s directors (such as dates of birth, places of residence or the like).
- Secondly, no shareholding information is available in the KBO database.
Both of these limitations are mitigated to some extent by the Belgian Gazette announcements and the annual accounts published in the Belgian National Bank database.
- Thirdly, the KBO database does not allow searches by name of a director to identify corporate affiliations held by that individual. This is mitigated through our own search methodology.
Corporate information available in the official gazette and Belgian National Bank
The Belgian Gazette frequently contains important company announcements, often in some detail. For instance, an announcement of establishment might provide full residential addresses and dates of births of a company’s founders and may also include the initial shareholding structure. Subsequent announcements also sometimes contain similar information, director resignations and appointments, as well as (sometimes) changes in the company’s shareholders. As such, a review of these announcements is crucial to understand more about the ownership of a subject company and its principals.
Annual accounts (Jaarrekening in Dutch) deposited with the Belgian National Bank often provide a wealth of further information over and above financial indicators (such as revenue, profit or loss and net assets), including residential addresses of directors, subsidiaries, and sometimes shareholding information.
Directorship searches
The official KBO database and announcements published in the official Belgian Gazette cannot be searched by directorship. As such, it is difficult to establish and identify corporate affiliations held by an individual in Belgium.
Through our own search methodology, Maddocks Insight is able to carry out Belgian directorship searches with a high degree of accuracy. We can also help read between the lines of the information provided in the Belgian corporate registry.
