Information
1.) The Register Portal of the German Federal States is the electronic communication system specified by the states’ justice departments through which data from the legal entity registers of the judiciary kept by the register courts may be retrieved. It is operated by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia on behalf of all states’ justice departments. This comprises the Commercial Register Sections A and B, the Register of Cooperatives, the Partnerships Register and the Register of Associations. For individual legal entities following information is provided:
- Index data
- Documents
- Data on operating entities
- Other publications
- Current printout (AD)
- Chronological printout (CD)
- Historic printout (HD)
- Structured register content (SI), data record as XML file
In cooperation with the states’ justice departments and register courts the Register Portal provides any resources required for viewing of the legal entity registers maintained by the judiciary. Breakdowns and high demand or necessary maintenance works may cause any capacity bottlenecks or limitations. We also cannot rule out that in certain circumstances services may be interrupted by large-scale abusive calls.
2.) These Terms of Use define the rules for the public user relationship with the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia when services of this website are used, including any search and retrieval of data as well as storing data and printing hard copies from the Commercial, Cooperative, Partnership Companies and Associations Registers (register information). Sections 9 HGB, 156 subsection 1 GenG, 5 subsection 2 PartGG, 79 BGB, 52, 53 HRV and 33, 36 VRV are applicable.
3.) The viewing of the legal entity registers of the judiciary as well as of any document filed with the Commercial Register is accessible for any person by means of individual retrieval (refer to section 9 subsection 1 sentence 1 HGB, 79 subsection 3 sentence 1 BGB). Systematic retrievals for the purpose of establishing, enhancing or updating independent full or partial registers are not permitted.
4.) The acquired register information may be retrieved, saved, used and disseminated only to the extent allowed under applicable data protection regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU 2016/679 of 27.04.2016) and the data protection laws of the federal government and the federal states in Germany.
5.) Not more than 60 searches or retrievals of legal entities per hour may be conducted at the Register Portal. If you can prove that a higher frequency of retrievals is required, then you can apply with the service office of the Register Portal at the local court of Hagen for an access with a registered IP address as provided in point 7.
6.) The Register Portal shall block individual IP addresses and discontinue specific user sessions if there is a suspicion that there is a breach of statutory requirements of these Terms of Use. In some cases, these measures or any other appropriate technical measures can also be taken in order to maintain the availability of the Register Portal in times of high frequency traffic, to restore availability of resources or to evenly distribute resources among its users. In case of any overload or any suspicion of abuse, the Register Portal reserves the right to reduce its capacities, introduce blocks and permanently shut out individual users or user groups from the service.
7.) You can apply with the service office of the Register Portal to register an IP address that you will use to access the Register Portal for purposes where the rule in Point 5) sentence 1 does not apply (whitelist IP). In the application you have to specify the extent to which you will retrieve information from the Register Portal and for what purpose you want to retrieve such information. The applying party shall undertake to comply with the Terms of Use. Should anything indicate that a user, by conducting his or her retrievals or searches, may be in breach of Section 9 subsection 1 sentence 1 HGB, such user has to prove to the service office his or her interest in any excessive use of the service. If no proof hereof can be provided, then any such registration may be denied.
As part of the information provided to visitors, this website includes also some links or references to other websites. As a rule, the respective provider of these third-party websites is responsible for such information. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia only provides access to these contents.
At the time when the link or reference has been provided to a third-party site its contents had been checked as to whether the information made available there could cause a possible civil or criminal liability. Nevertheless, we have no influence on the current or future design, the contents or the copyright on the third-party websites to which we provide a link or reference. Therefore, we expressly point out that we do not assume any responsibility for the contents provided on any such website we refer to and which has been changed after we have installed a link to its contents on our website.
The provider of the linked page alone shall be liable for illegal, faulty or incomplete content, and in particular for losses resulting from the use or non-use of information provided in this way and not the one who merely by way of web links refers to such publications made available on the internet.
If not indicated otherwise, all pages on this information server are protected by the copyright law. This applies in particular to texts, pictures and charts, including their arrangement on the websites. Reproduction or use of such pages (or any parts thereof) in other electronic or print publications and their publication (including making them public on the internet) is not permitted without a prior consent of the copyright holder.
A publication or further use of data published on these pages under the name "register of companies" (Handelsregister) is not permitted (Section 8 subsection 2 of the German Commercial Code). Some pictures, charts, text or other files as a whole or in part can be protected by a copyright held by a third party.
All trademarks referred to in this internet presentation, which may be protected under a copyright held by a third party, are fully subject to the provisions of the trademark ownership laws currently effective for the registered owner. By mentioning a trademark in this web presentation we do not allow to draw a conclusion that the specific trademark mentioned on these pages is not protected by a copyright of a third party.
The national provisions based on which under Article 3 paragraphs 5, 6 and 7 of the Directive 2009/101/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 16 September 2009 on coordination of safeguards which, for the protection of the interests of members and third parties, are required by Member States of companies within the meaning of the second paragraph of Article 54 of the Treaty, with a view to making such safeguards equivalent (EC No L 258, 1.10.2009, p.11) third parties can refer to the facts as indicated in Article 2 of the same Directive, are contained in Section 15 of the German Commercial Code.
Under this provision:
In a dispute with any third party the company can refer only to such facts which have been duly registered and published or which had already been known to such third party (Section 15 subsection 1 of the German Commercial Code). A third party has to accept such facts that have been duly registered and published. This shall not apply to legal acts which have been taken within fifteen days upon publishing, if the third party is able to prove that it neither had knowledge of the fact nor was required to know such fact (Section 15 subsection 2 of the German Commercial Code). If a fact had not been registered properly then the third party, in a dispute with the party who is required to register the fact, is entitled to refer to the fact as it had been published, unless such third party had knowledge of the faulty registration (Section 15 subsection 3 of the German Commercial Code).
In the common register of the federal states the German judiciary authorities provide the opportunity to view entries into the registers of companies in all federal states from any PC workstation at any time. In addition to the registers of companies you are able to access data in the registers of cooperatives and partnerships and to some extent you can access the data in the register of associations.
You can search for registered companies and corporations even if you do not know the particular register number. The contents of the registered data are provided in various forms as a PDF document and can be saved electronically or printed out as a hard copy.
We provide the information in the following form:
- current hard copy printout with a summary of all currently valid entries,
- chronological hard copy printout with all data provided since the register has been transferred to its electronic form,
- historical hard copy printout with all data that were valid until the register was transferred to its electronic form.
The relevance to the current situation of the data you can view in the register is guaranteed. You will receive authentic data from the official register, because a search is always performed among the real-time data of the register of companies.
In addition, in the rgister portal you can download documents that had been submitted to the register court by electronic means and belong to the so-called register folder, including registration application, share holder lists and company’s articles of association. In addition, you can get information on the register announcements under Section 10 HGB.
For detailed information on what parts of the register the individual states have provided please refer to the state info.
Through the document retrieval service you can always receive any document available for a company in the register folder. But you will find here only documents that have been submitted to the register court electronically.
If you are not able to access a specific document you are looking for in the register portal, you can apply at the competent register court for this document to be made available online. Such a document may not be older than ten years. In addition, this service provided upon individual application is subject to a charge (currently 2.00 euros per page, minimum charge is 25.00 euros).
Link to the search in the court database
Annual accounts and balance sheets cannot be accessed through this register portal. These documents are provided only via the Business Register of the Federal Gazette (Bundesanzeiger).
The respective district courts who maintain the registers are responsible for the entries made into the individual registers. For any queries about the contents of the entries please contact the respective district court (Amtsgericht).
Link to the search in the court database
Responsible for this error is a setting in the Internet Explorer. Please check whether you have marked the option “Do not save encrypted pages on hard disk” in the Internet Options in the tab “Advanced” under “Security”. If you have selected this option, it will prevent any encrypted file that has been transmitted from being saved, thus preventing you also from displaying the file on the screen. You can tell that a transmission of data has been encrypted by the yellow lock symbol in the status bar and by the protocol indication “https://” in the address bar of the Internet Explorer. For security reasons all register excerpts will be transmitted in an encrypted form.
The register portal is frequently a target for automated bulk queries. Very often the frequency of such bulk queries can reach an extent that will constitute an offence under the statutory provisions of Sections 303a and b of the German Criminal Code. Due to this situation we have banned any queries that will originate from the so-called TOR (TOR = the onion routing) network. In addition to this, we will ban any individual IP address any time when the conditions for the offence as described above shall occur. In both cases the person who has issued a query will see an error message quoted above.
It can occasionally occur that individual IP addresses will be banned due to a mistake. In such cases, even a legitimate query can result in the error message mentioned above.
If you have any question, please call the respective service phone number for the transparency register provided on the start page at www.transparenzregister.de. Unfortunately, the service office of the register portal cannot answer your questions with regard to the transparency register.
