Company briefs - 2011-08-04

Two weeks after amendments to Latvia’s Commercial Law came into force, the Register of Enterprises has received the first notification revealing the names of a company’s actual beneficiaries or offshore companies’ owners, the Register of Enterprises representative Baiba Vismane said, reports Nozare.lv. The amendments to the Commercial Law came into force on July 13. According to the new provision, every shareholder, who officially holds at least 25 percent of a given company’s shares while the true beneficiary is someone else, must report about it to the company in 14 days time and reveal the true beneficiary’s name.

The sales revenue of TV stations that are members of the Association of Estonian Broadcasters rose in the first half of this year by 13.3 percent as compared to the same time a year ago, but the turnover grew mainly thanks to a 21.6 percent increase of advertising prices, reports Postimees Online. Head of the Association of Estonian Broadcasters Toomas Vara said that these figures show that the TV market that suffered greatly during the economic recession is now recovering. “The allowed advertising volume of larger TV stations is sold out at advertising’s high season, and, thus, the fall in advertising has been replaced with an increase.” The AEB unites most of the privately owned broadcasting organizations operating in Estonia.