An effort to make the shareholder structures of joint stock
companies transparent has encouraged the former Justice Minister,
Jiří Pospíail, to draft an Act on
Increasing Transparency of Joint Stock Companies and on Amendment
to Certain Acts,1 which entails much
expected limitations on bearer shares. The aim of the Act, whose
draft was approved by the government on 30 May 2012 and will be
discussed by the Chamber of Deputies on its upcoming session in
September, is to make it possible to identify a shareholder at any
moment, and thus eliminate the risks of a non-transparent and
corrupt environment and money laundering through anonymous joint
stock companies.
The draft Act allows for the cancellation of the
circulation of physical bearer shares. Physical bearer
shares, which will not be immobilized, will change ex lege
to physical registered shares. It will be possible to avoid such a
change only by (i) the book-entering of shares,
i.e., by changing their form
