Irina Otrokhova

The KYC procedure is based on the risk estimations as well as basic identity information for customer identification. The companies aim to assess the risk of each individual customer's involvement in illegal activity.

Rendering corporate and fiduciary services in Cyprus is a regulated type of activity, which requires licensing. License for rendering such services is issued by a regulatory authority, Cyprus Security and Exchange Commission (“CySec”).

A few years ago, the procedure of opening a bank account for business was not unusual and was not associated with any complex procedures. Relations between businesses and banks were based on trustworthy partnership, but in recent years the world has changed a lot.

The principle of ‘Substance over Legal Form’ is central to the faithful representation and reliability of information contained in the financial statements. The key point of the concept is that a transaction should not be recorded in such a manner as to hide the true intent of the transaction, [...]