Mali registers businesses in the Registre du Commerce et du Crédit Mobilier (RCCM) — the Trade and Personal Property Credit Register. There is no separate national companies register: the RCCM covers legal persons and sole traders alike, and doubles as the register of security interests over movable property. Mali is an OHADA member state, having ratified the treaty in February 1995 with entry into force in September of the same year.

The company registry in Mali

The single most misreported point about Mali is who keeps the register. Two bodies are involved and their roles are different.

The register itself is kept by the greffe of the Tribunal de Commerce. Article 36 of the OHADA Acte uniforme portant sur le droit commercial général places the RCCM at the registry of the competent court under the supervision of its president or a delegated judge, and Loi n°2011-038 of 15 July 2011 established commercial courts in the regions of Kayes, Sikasso, Ségou, Mopti, Gao and the District of Bamako.

The filing counter is the guichet unique created within API-Mali, the investment promotion agency, by Décret n°08-276/P-RM of 13 May 2008 as amended in 2009. Its article 14 charges the guichet unique with effecting registration in the RCCM and, where relevant, in the trades register, with replies delivered 72 hours after lodging. The commercial court, the tax administration, the social security institute, the urban planning service and the employment agency all keep desks physically inside it, and regional windows operate in Kayes, Ségou, Sikasso and Mopti.

A confirmed institutional change under the transition deserves recording. Loi n°2024-030 of 13 December 2024 replaced the 2011 judicial organisation law. Commercial courts survive, and article 52 assigns the greffe the keeping of the registers and the delivery of engrossments, copies and extracts — but article 39 removes the juges consulaires, the lay judges elected through the chamber of commerce, from the composition of the court. The Bamako commercial court’s own website still describes the pre-2024 composition and is out of date on this.

On the online question the answer is blunt: there is no online RCCM filing and no online RCCM search for Mali on any official channel. API-Mali has no company lookup; the Bamako court advertises a user space for lodging requests, but the host was unreachable. Mali also contributes nothing to the OHADA regional RCCM portal — queried directly, the portal holds tens of thousands of records from Togo, Niger, Gabon, Chad and Congo and zero from Mali, despite Mali having a country page there. The only free official online lookup touching Malian businesses is the tax administration’s active-taxpayer portal, which is not the register.

Above the local register, article 36 provides for a Fichier National and a Fichier Régional. Mali has designated its national file by decree: Décret n°06-492/P-RM of 30 November 2006 places it at the Direction Nationale des Affaires Judiciaires et du Sceau in the Ministry of Justice. The regional file sits at the Common Court of Justice and Arbitration.

Sole traders are registered, not merely declared, and the government procedure sheet confirms they receive a certificat d’immatriculation au RCCM. The OHADA entreprenant is exempt from registration and files a free declaration of activity instead — but Malian implementation could not be confirmed: no Malian text under that name appears in the legislation database and the term is absent from the general tax code, where the simplified regime is instead the impôt synthétique.

Three identifiers coexist, obtained in one pass. The RCCM number comes from the greffe. The NIF, the tax identification number, comes from the tax administration, whose own instructions require a copy of the commercial court registration among the supporting documents — so registration is an input to the tax number, not the same number. And the NINA, the national identification number under Loi n°06-040 of 11 August 2006, is issued through the guichet unique and counts as a single registration with every service required to use it.

Legal forms that can be registered in Mali

Company law is the OHADA Acte uniforme relatif au droit des sociétés commerciales et du groupement d’intérêt économique of 30 January 2014, applying directly, alongside a national Code de Commerce, Loi n°92-002 of 27 August 1992 as amended in 2001.

  • Entreprise individuelle — the sole trader, personally liable without limit. No capital requirement.
  • Société en nom collectif (SNC) — the general partnership; all partners are traders, jointly and severally liable without limit. No minimum capital.
  • Société en commandite simple (SCS) — the limited partnership; general partners unlimited and joint, limited partners liable to their contribution. No minimum capital.
  • Société à responsabilité limitée (SARL) and its single-member form the SARLU — members liable only up to their contributions. The standard vehicle for small and medium business.
  • Société anonyme (SA) and the single-shareholder SA unipersonnelle — shareholders liable up to their contributions, rights held in shares. Minimum capital FCFA 10,000,000.
  • Société par actions simplifiée (SAS) and the single-member SASU — liability limited to contributions, with governance set freely in the statutes and capital freely fixed.
  • Groupement d’intérêt économique (GIE) — members are jointly and severally liable for its debts; it exists to serve its members’ own activity rather than to make a profit, and may be formed with no capital at all.
  • Succursale — the branch of a foreign company, registrable but with no separate legal personality.
  • Bureau de représentation ou de liaison — a representation or liaison office, again without separate personality and confined to preparatory or auxiliary activity.
  • Sociétés civiles commercial by their object, the société civile professionnelle, the société d’État, the société d’économie mixte and public establishments with an economic activity and legal and financial autonomy are all registrable.

A rule that catches out foreign investors: under article 120 of the uniform act, a branch belonging to a foreign person must be contributed to a company incorporated in a member state within two years of its creation, unless exempted by order of the minister responsible for commerce — in Mali the Minister of Industry and Commerce. The exemption itself lasts two years and is not renewable, and non-compliance leads to strike-off after a court decision.

On capital, Mali has exercised the OHADA national option and abolished the SARL minimum. Article 311 of the uniform act sets FCFA 1,000,000 “sauf dispositions nationales contraires”, and Mali legislated to the contrary: Loi n°2015-014 of 30 May 2015 provides that the SARL’s share capital is freely fixed by the partners in the statutes, divided into equal shares whose nominal value may not be below FCFA 5,000. So the figure of one million francs, still displayed on OHADA’s generic pages, does not apply in Mali. The paying-up rule is unchanged: cash contributions at least half paid on subscription with the balance within two years of registration.

Two structures have no legal personality and are never registered: the société en participation and the société créée de fait. Cooperatives are outside the RCCM — they go to the Registre des Sociétés Coopératives kept by the territorial administration, not the court, under the OHADA cooperative act; the specific Malian body holding it could not be confirmed. Decentralised financial systems fall under Loi n°2010-013 with licensing by the Minister of Finance; artisans go to the Répertoire des Métiers; associations receive a receipt from the territorial administration ministry; and non-governmental organisations sign a framework agreement with the government.

Public and restricted data in the Malian register

The statutory position is open. The final paragraph of article 36 states that the information in the forms lodged at the registry and in the register is intended for the information of the public, and article 97 entitles any person to obtain that information electronically together with extracts or copies of documents published there — though article 98 warns that electronically supplied information is not certified unless expressly requested, and otherwise counts only as simple information.

The practical position is different and should be stated plainly: there is no working online search of the Malian RCCM. Consultation is an in-person or on-request exercise at the competent greffe. The one free official online search that does work is the tax administration’s taxpayer portal, and it returns only five fields — tax number, designation, tax type, status and tax centre. It shows no RCCM number, no legal form, no address, no directors, no shareholders, no capital and no dates.

Directors and the identity of natural-person traders are part of the registered file under articles 44 to 46, and the statutes are among the documents deposited, so both fall within the publicly obtainable set at the greffe — they are simply not online. Shareholder lists as such are company records: the 2024 anti-money-laundering ordinance requires a company to keep a register of shareholders or members with names, share numbers and classes and attached voting rights, held by the company rather than published.

Beneficial ownership in Mali has two layers, and neither delivers open public access.

The first is sectoral. Décret n°2022-0107/PT-RM of 22 February 2022 instituted a public register of beneficial owners of extractive companies, established at the registries that keep the RCCM and supervised by the judge responsible for the register. It defines a beneficial owner as a natural person holding directly or indirectly at least two per cent of capital or voting rights, or exercising control by other means, and requires the declaration to identify politically exposed persons. But despite the word “public” in its title, article 14 confines access to persons who apply to the supervising judge and justify a legitimate interest, with consultations logged for five years. Immediate free transmission is reserved to a closed list of authorities: magistrates and judicial police, the heads of the Treasury, Budget, Mines, Customs, Taxes and State property, the extractive transparency committees, the anti-fraud bodies and the financial intelligence unit. It is a legitimate-interest register with judicial gatekeeping, not an open one.

The second is general and, so far, only on paper. Ordonnance n°2024-011/PT-RM of 30 August 2024, ratified in December 2024, repealed the previous 2016 anti-money-laundering law — so any source still citing that law is out of date, including the financial intelligence unit’s own website. Its article 122 requires the competent authority to establish a national register of beneficial owners of legal persons and arrangements, recorded in a digitally searchable format and made available to the public as well as to obliged entities, and article 120 requires basic and beneficial ownership information on legal arrangements to be accessible online. However, no implementing decree or order for that register appears in the legislation database, and no register or public interface could be found. The obligation exists; the register could not be confirmed to.

Financial statements are a similar story of law outrunning practice. Article 269 of the uniform act requires commercial companies to file their états financiers de synthèse at the RCCM of the state of the registered office within one month of approval, with a court remedy against a defaulting director, and article 97 brings filed accounts within the publicly obtainable set. A société anonyme must additionally publish its approved accounts in a legal-notices newspaper. State-owned entities are genuinely published: Décret n°94-301 of 20 September 1994 requires the accounts of public industrial and commercial establishments and state companies to appear in the Journal Officiel. But whether filed private-company accounts are in practice retrievable in Mali could not be confirmed.

Documents that can be obtained from the register

  • Certificat RCCM, the certificate of registration in the Trade and Personal Property Credit Register — proof of legal existence and of trader status, and a required input to the tax number. Issued to companies and sole traders alike.
  • Certificat d’immatriculation au Répertoire National d’Identification des Personnes Physiques et Morales — carrying the national identification number and serving as a single registration with all services required to use it.
  • Carte d’identification fiscale — the tax identification card carrying the NIF, used for filing, invoicing, customs and public procurement.
  • Journal contenant l’annonce légale — the newspaper carrying the statutory incorporation notice, arranged by the guichet unique, which makes the incorporation opposable to third parties.
  • Expéditions, copies et extraits — authenticated register and court documents, whose delivery Loi n°2024-030 makes an express function of the greffe.
  • Certificat de nationalité des sociétés commerciales — signed by the president of the commercial court, used to prove a company’s Malian nationality in public procurement and sector licensing.
  • Autorisation d’exercice — the sector-specific operating authorisation, by registration, decision or order depending on the sector, for regulated activities such as construction, tourism, transport, health, education, the press and customs broking.
  • Arrêté portant agrément au Code des Investissements — the investment-code approval issued through API-Mali, giving access to the tax and customs incentives.

The OHADA product catalogue additionally names the extrait du RCCM, the historique des modifications, the constitutive and up-to-date statutes, the certificat de non dépôt de compte annuel, the état d’endettement, and certificates of non-registration and of objection or non-objection. Because Mali contributes nothing to that portal, it could not be verified that Malian registries issue them under those exact names.

Documents that could not be confirmed for Mali: any single consolidated status certificate equivalent to the French Kbis — the Malian deliverable is the certificat RCCM; a certificat de non-faillite; a tax-regularity certificate issued by the register rather than the tax administration; and any certified beneficial-ownership extract available to the public.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who keeps the trade register in Mali?

The registry of the Tribunal de Commerce, under article 36 of the OHADA commercial law act. API-Mali’s guichet unique is the filing counter and delivers replies within 72 hours.

Is there a minimum share capital for a SARL in Mali?

No. Loi n°2015-014 of 30 May 2015 makes the capital freely fixed by the partners, with only the nominal value per share required to be at least FCFA 5,000. The OHADA default of one million francs does not apply.

Can Malian companies be searched online?

No. There is no online RCCM search or filing, and Mali contributes no records to the OHADA regional portal. The only working official lookup is the tax administration’s active-taxpayer search.

Does Mali have a beneficial ownership register?

One exists for extractive companies since 2022, but access requires an application to the supervising judge and proof of legitimate interest. A general national register is required by the 2024 anti-money-laundering ordinance but could not be confirmed to exist.

Do Malian companies file annual accounts?

The OHADA act requires filing at the RCCM within one month of approval, and state companies’ accounts are published in the Journal Officiel. Whether filed private-company accounts are retrievable in practice could not be confirmed.

Are sole traders in the same register as companies?

Yes. The RCCM covers both, and a sole trader receives a certificate of registration. The OHADA entreprenant status, which requires only a declaration, has no confirmed Malian implementation.

What identifiers does a new Malian company receive?

Three: the RCCM number from the court registry, the tax identification number from the tax administration, and the national identification number, all obtained through the guichet unique.

Sources

Keywords

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