Libya keeps a السجل التجاري العام (General Commercial Register) under the Ministry of Economy and Trade (وزارة الاقتصاد والتجارة). Its operating law is a single modern statute, قانون رقم 23 لسنة 2010 بشأن النشاط التجاري — the Commercial Activity Law No. 23 of 2010 — a code of 1,359 articles issued at Sirte on 28 January 2010.

The company registry in Libya

Before anything else, an attribution that honest research requires. Libya has had rival administrations and duplicated institutions, and everything described here is the register operated by the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity’s Ministry of Economy and Trade, whose domains are the only ones reachable. No official web presence for any rival eastern ministry or parallel commercial register could be found; that is an absence of evidence rather than evidence of absence, and it should be read as such. The ministry’s own site is even inconsistent about its own name, with older pages still reading وزارة الاقتصاد والصناعة.

The old Libyan Commercial Code of 1953 is repealed. Article 1358 of Law 23/2010 abolished it together with twenty other statutes, including the laws on chambers of commerce, commercial agencies and public-sector companies. There is one commercial code in force in Libya, and it is Law 23/2010. The register’s working rules are in قرار مجلس الوزراء رقم 187 لسنة 2012, the Executive Regulation of the Commercial Register.

That regulation gives the register its shape. A General Commercial Register sits at the ministry with subordinate local offices, and article 5 divides it into four sections: individual traders, commercial companies, civil companies, and investment funds and other entities the law requires to register. Special registers exist alongside for commercial agencies, brokerage, supply and export. Registration must be made within ten days of taking the premises, changes within ten days, and each registered person receives a dedicated register page. Legal personality begins on registration and ends on strike-off, and article 485 makes the point that registration in any other register does not substitute for the commercial register.

Individual traders are inside the same register, in section (أ). صغار التجار, petty merchants under article 10, are exempt from registration though they still need a trading licence.

The online system is منظومة السجل التجاري, built and run by مركز المعلومات والتوثيق الاقتصادي, the Economic Information and Documentation Center. A frank operational note: when checked in August 2026 the register system was returning a maintenance page, as were the licences, agencies and consumer-cooperative systems, so there was no working online company search in Libya on that date. The foreign-branch registration system remained live.

The commercial register number and the tax number are different numbers obtained in sequence. The documented path runs from the negative name certificate, through the contract drafter and the capital deposit, to the مستخرج السجل التجاري, then the chamber of commerce certificate, then the tax number, then the trading licence — and the register extract is a required input to opening the tax file. The register also exposes a الرقم الآلي الموحد, a unified automated number, whose relationship to the tax number could not be confirmed on any official text.

The chamber of commerce is part of the statutory chain, not an optional extra. Articles 1331 and 1332 make registration in غرفة التجارة والصناعة والزراعة compulsory for anyone carrying on commercial, industrial or service activity, and prohibit renewal of an activity licence without proof of it. Chamber registration runs for one year and is renewed annually, and the application must state the commercial register number.

Legal forms that can be registered in Libya

Article 24 requires every company organised by the law to register, except the شركة المحاصّة.

شركات الأشخاص (companies of persons):

  • شركة التضامن (general partnership) — partners jointly and severally liable without limit. Family and small trading businesses.
  • شركة التوصية البسيطة (simple limited partnership) — at least one general partner with unlimited joint liability and one limited partner liable only up to his contribution.
  • شركة المحاصّة (undisclosed partnership) — no formalities and no legal personality; third parties acquire rights only against the principal partner. Not registrable.

شركات الأموال (capital companies):

  • الشركة المساهمة (joint-stock company) — shareholders liable only to the value of their shares; the name must be followed by شركة مساهمة ليبية. Minimum subscribed capital 100,000 LYD, at least thirty per cent paid at incorporation with the balance within five years of registration, nominal share value ten dinars, a minimum of ten shareholders and no natural person above ten per cent of capital. Capital above five million dinars must be offered by public subscription through the securities market.
  • الشركة المساهمة العامة (public joint-stock company) — capital wholly owned by one or more public legal persons, taking the joint-stock form.
  • الشركة القابضة (holding company) — not liable for its subsidiaries’ debts, except on a subsidiary’s bankruptcy where it holds more than seventy-five per cent.

Double-nature companies:

  • شركة التوصية بالأسهم (partnership limited by shares) — working partners unlimitedly and jointly liable, limited partners liable only to their subscribed capital, with capital divided into shares.
  • الشركة ذات المسؤولية المحدودة (limited liability company) — from two to twenty-five partners, each liable only to his quota, with quotas not represented by shares. Minimum capital 3,000 LYD, quota nominal value not below ten dinars, paid in full at incorporation. It may not carry on banking or insurance, use public subscription or issue loan securities.

الشركات المدنية (civil companies): the التشاركية, a participation company for agricultural, professional and craft activity requiring at least three participants who must all hold Libyan nationality; the شركة الانتفاع العقاري, a real-estate usufruct company; and الشركات التعاونية, cooperatives, which may be of limited or unlimited liability.

Also registrable: the صندوق الاستثمار (investment fund), which acquires legal personality from its entry in a dedicated section of the register and requires the prior permission of the non-banking financial markets authority; and public and mixed companies. The تجمع الشركات, a consortium of companies, expressly has no legal personality and is not registered as an entity.

Foreign participation is tightly framed. A الشركة المساهمة المشتركة (joint joint-stock company) must take the joint-stock form with subscribed capital of not less than 1,000,000 LYD, and foreign participation is capped at 49 per cent, raisable by reasoned ministerial decision to no more than sixty per cent; its chairman must be Libyan. A joint limited liability company between Libyan and foreign natural persons requires 50,000 LYD and is confined to a scheduled list of fields. A فرع شركة أجنبية (branch of a foreign company) needs ministerial permission, 250,000 LYD transferred to a Libyan bank, is limited to a five-year renewable term and one branch per company, and is restricted to eleven permitted sectors; it must lodge a separate externally audited balance sheet with the register within ten days of completion. A مكتب تمثيل (representative office) may study the market and gather data but may not conclude contracts, runs for two years renewable once, and must keep a bank balance of at least 150,000 LYD. Retail and wholesale trade, import, supply, commercial agencies, land transport, professional consultancy and several other activities are reserved to Libyans.

Public and restricted data in the Libyan register

The statutory position is unusually open, and it is worth stating precisely because the ministry’s own English translation gets it backwards. Article 485 of the Arabic original provides that any person may inspect the register and obtain extracts of the entries and information in it, including the last balance sheet deposited, against the prescribed fee, with bankruptcy judgments omitted where rehabilitation has been granted and attachment judgments where lifted. The published English version renders this as a prohibition — a mistranslation that inverts the meaning. The Arabic is permissive.

What an extract shows is correspondingly broad: the register office and registration number, the section code, the registration date, the trade name, legal form, incorporation date and duration, the address and contacts, the purposes of the activity, the subscribed and paid capital split between cash and in kind, and then the people — the owner or board members or partners with their identity card numbers, nationality, capacity and date of appointment, the legal representative, the supervisory board, the branches and agencies, and the names of agents and authorised signatories. Judicial entries follow: authorisation for a minor to trade, separation of spouses’ assets, attachment, bankruptcy, suspension of payments, rehabilitation, expulsion of partners, removal of managers and preventive composition. That is materially more disclosure than most registers offer.

Financial statements are filed and legally public. A joint-stock company’s board must lodge the balance sheet with its report, the control authority’s report and the general assembly minutes within ten days of approval; foreign branches and representative offices lodge audited balance sheets; and on liquidation the balance sheet and the company’s books are deposited and may be inspected by any person on payment of the fee.

The register’s own gazette, نشرة السجل, is mandated by article 25 of the regulation to publish registrations with the office, date, number and section, the trade name, the company type and its subscribed and paid capital, the location and the activity. No issue of that bulletin could be found published online.

Online, the service catalogue shows only three endpoints open without a login: a search of registered company names, verification of the unified automated number, and a browsable list of commercial activities. Everything else — incorporation, amendment, printing the register, the negative certificate, transaction tracking — requires a registered account or a licensed contract drafter. As noted above, all three public endpoints were unreachable when checked, so the exact field set the search returns could not be observed.

On beneficial ownership the answer is negative. No beneficial ownership register exists in Libya. The anti-money-laundering law, issued as Presidential Council decree-law No. 1013 of 2017 and published in a special issue of the official gazette in February 2018, defines the beneficial owner and obliges financial institutions and designated non-financial businesses to identify and verify him as part of customer due diligence — but it creates no central or public register and makes no reference to the commercial register, whose extract form has no beneficial-owner field at all. Such data therefore sits only with obliged entities and reaches the financial intelligence unit and competent authorities. A draft replacement law was under discussion with the House of Representatives in June 2026 but had not been enacted.

Documents that can be obtained from the register

  • مستخرج من السجل التجاري (extract from the commercial register) — the core document, carrying the full field set described above, stamped with the office seal and endorsed with the registration or amendment date and time. It is valid for one year from the date it is drawn up, and it is the prerequisite for the chamber certificate, the tax file, the trading licence, a bank account, tender participation and any amendment.
  • شهادة سلبية بالاسم التجاري (negative certificate for the trade name) — confirming that the proposed name is not already entered for another merchant in the same line of trade. The first step of every incorporation.
  • الرمز الإلكتروني للشركة (company electronic code) — a printable machine-verifiable code tied to the register entry, used for digital verification.
  • الميزانية المودعة (the deposited balance sheet) — the last balance sheet lodged with the register, together with liquidation balance sheets and company books held after strike-off. Expressly obtainable by any person.
  • نشرة السجل (the register bulletin) — the statutory publication of registrations. Mandated by regulation, but its actual publication could not be confirmed.

Adjacent documents in the same chain come from other bodies: the شهادة القيد بالغرفة التجارية, the chamber of commerce registration certificate, valid one year and required for licence renewal, alongside the chamber’s certificates of origin and document attestation; the tax file and tax number from the tax authority; and the الرخصة التجارية, the commercial licence, without which trading may not begin.

Several documents commonly assumed to exist could not be confirmed in Libya: a certificate of good standing, absent from the law, the regulation, the fee schedule and the e-service catalogue; a certificate of incumbency, whose function is instead served by the officer data inside the extract; a register-issued certified copy of the memorandum and articles, since the memorandum is deposited but no copy product is listed; a self-service electronic extract with legal effect; and register-issued charge or pledge certificates, although pledges over a business are registrable for a renewable five-year term.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the company register in Libya?

The General Commercial Register, kept by the Ministry of Economy and Trade under Commercial Activity Law No. 23 of 2010 and its Executive Regulation of 2012.

Is the old Libyan Commercial Code still in force?

No. Article 1358 of Law 23/2010 repealed the 1953 Commercial Code and twenty other statutes. Law 23/2010 is the single commercial code in force.

Can Libyan companies be searched online?

In principle the register system offers a public name search, a unified-number check and an activity list. When checked in August 2026 the system was under maintenance and none of them was reachable.

Is the Libyan commercial register public?

Yes. Article 485 allows any person to inspect it and obtain extracts, including the last deposited balance sheet. Note that the ministry’s own English translation of that article inverts its meaning.

Does Libya have a beneficial ownership register?

No. The 2017 anti-money-laundering instrument defines the beneficial owner and imposes due-diligence duties on financial institutions and designated businesses, but creates no register and does not touch the commercial register.

What is the minimum capital for a Libyan company?

3,000 LYD fully paid for a limited liability company and 100,000 LYD subscribed for a joint-stock company, with higher thresholds for joint companies with foreign participation, foreign branches and representative offices.

Can a foreign company own a Libyan company outright?

Not in a joint company. Foreign participation is capped at 49 per cent, raisable by reasoned ministerial decision to no more than sixty per cent, and the chairman must be Libyan. A foreign branch is the alternative, within eleven permitted sectors.

Sources

Keywords

business register Libya, company registry Libya, commercial register Libya, السجل التجاري, Law 23 of 2010 Libya, Ministry of Economy and Trade Libya, EIDC Libya, foreign branch Libya, joint stock company Libya, LLC Libya, chamber of commerce Libya, commercial register extract Libya