Recital 37

(37) In order to enhance the functioning of the internal market, third parties do not only need to have access to company information in their own Member State, but also to company information in another Member State. As would be the case for a domestic situation, third parties need to have legal certainty about the legal representatives, partners in partnerships and other persons that can lawfully represent a company, and about the single shareholders of companies in other Member States. Therefore, such information should be made available at Union level through the system of interconnection of registers, which provides access to such information in a multilingual and comparable way, thereby ensuring the same level of protection of third parties in cross-border situations. In order to ensure legal certainty as to the identity of the legal representatives, partners in partnerships, and other persons that can lawfully represent a company, as well as single shareholders, it is necessary that such persons can be unequivocally identified. The need for ensuring certainty about the exact identity of such persons is particularly high in cross-border situations where the system of interconnection of registers provides access to such information on all limited liability companies and commercial partnerships. Given that national systems have divergent approaches to the identification of such persons, it is necessary to harmonise the personal data categories that can be accessed at Union level. While the first names and surnames of such persons constitute personal data that serve to identify them, first names and surnames do not guarantee unique identification in all cases and thus need to be complemented by additional information. Adding only the year of birth would not be sufficient in this regard given the prevalence of certain names, both first names and surnames, singly and in combination, in Member States and the fact that the popularity of certain names often follows yearly cycles, with the result that many persons with identical names are born in the same year. It is therefore necessary and proportionate to require registers to make available the full date of birth or equivalent information for those Member States that do not record the full date of birth in the national register. Such a requirement would allow the unequivocal identification of legal representatives, partners in partnerships, and other persons that can lawfully represent a company, as well as of single shareholders.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-10-14 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.