What lawyers say about the new corporate reporting disclosure regime

Tatiana Neveeva, senior partner at VERBA Legal, recalls that the closure of data has become a necessity for a long time – foreign regulators actively use open sources to determine the circle of persons who can add to the sanctions lists. “Unfortunately, often the information they receive is not relevant, but at the same time significantly complicates the activities of Russian individuals. In particular, outdated data from open sources are aggregated by databases used by foreign companies to check counterparties. As a result, even companies that are not associated with sanctioned persons can, on the basis of open data, be qualified as falling under sanctions restrictions,” she says.

Regarding government decree No. 1102 of July 4, there was a consensus in the legal community: the regime of partial data hiding is inevitable, but it has a negative impact on the investment environment. Evgeny Zubkov, Attorney at Forward Legal, notes that the list of cases in which issuers have the right not to disclose (limit disclosure) certain information, as well as the list of this information itself, remains quite wide. “This list contains very sensitive information that, if disclosed, would further extend sanctions to new individuals and entities, which the government is trying to avoid,” he says. At the same time, the presence of such a list, and even more so its expansion, may make it difficult for private investors to make decisions about investing in enterprises that hide or limit disclosure of information.

UPPERCASE LEGAL lawyer Valeria Doskovskikh points out that the data specified in the new government decree are sensitive, since it is the profitable part of the business that is often the determining factor for imposing sanctions against a particular company. “In a stable market situation, the sensitive data noted in the resolution are extremely important and interesting, since they allow a reasonable assessment of the state of a particular business, however, today’s sanctions restrictions are pushing for a course of protectionism in the economy and business,” she believes. However, according to her, sensitive data, which is especially now under enhanced protection, is still of great practical interest to investors. “Disclosure of some of the sensitive data of companies, on the one hand, would increase competition in the market and encourage some companies to modernize, thereby strengthening the stabilization of the economic situation, on the other hand, it could become destructive for other companies,” she explains the current conflict.

Diana Galieva