UAB, Company Code and VAT

What a UAB is

UAB stands for uždaroji akcinė bendrovė, the Lithuanian private limited liability company. Its shares are held privately and are not offered on a public market. The company holds its own assets, signs its own contracts and answers for its own obligations; shareholders risk the capital they put in rather than their personal property.

Two practical consequences follow for a buyer. The entity named in your contract, not the brand on the hoarding, is the party that owes you the flat. And a UAB exists only from the moment it is entered in the Register of Legal Entities, maintained by the Centre of Registers — which is also where anything that later happens to it is recorded.

A developer group may hold several entities, one per project or per function. That is ordinary structuring, not a warning sign. It does mean you should establish which of them is selling to you.

The company code

On registration, a legal entity receives a company code: a nine-digit identifier that stays with it for life. It appears on contracts, invoices, bank details and register extracts, and it is the key you type into a search box. Names can be similar and addresses change; the code does not.

Use it to pull the company’s register entry, which shows the legal form, the registered address, the manager and the powers of representation, the date of registration, the status of the entity, and whether any restructuring or insolvency proceedings have been recorded. Annual financial statements are filed with the register as well, so a company’s own accounts are a matter of public record rather than a favour.

The VAT number

The VAT number is a different thing with a different issuer. It is assigned by the State Tax Inspectorate when a company is registered for value added tax, begins with the country prefix LT, and exists for tax purposes: issuing invoices, accounting for VAT, and being identified in cross-border trade within the EU.

It is not proof of size, solvency or good standing, and a company can be perfectly real without being VAT-registered. What a VAT number does give you is a second, independent confirmation that the entity exists and is known to the tax authority — and, through the EU VIES system, a check you can run from outside Lithuania.

Our own entity serves as a worked example. The company is UAB Savo investicija, company code 304499183, VAT number LT100011304015, registered at Gerosios Vilties g. 27-131, Vilnius. Every check described on this page can be run against those details, and we would rather a buyer ran them.

Where both can be verified

Three public sources cover the ground:

• the Register of Legal Entities at the Centre of Registers — existence, legal form, address, manager, status, filed accounts;
• the State Tax Inspectorate — registration as a taxpayer and as a VAT payer;
• the EU VIES service — whether a VAT number is valid for intra-EU transactions, useful when you are reading from another member state.

The Real Property Register, kept by the same institution as the company register, answers the question the company register cannot: whether that company actually holds the plot and the building it is selling flats in. Pull both entries and set them next to each other.

What else to look at before paying

A code that verifies is the beginning, not the end. Before money moves, work through the mundane list:

• Does the entity in the draft contract match the entity you checked, code and all — and does it match the account you are asked to pay into?
• Is the person signing the manager named in the register, or do they hold a notarised power of attorney?
• Is the bank account in the company’s name, never a private individual’s?
• Does the company appear in the property register as owner of the plot, or as holder of a registered right over it?
• Are there entries about insolvency, restructuring or liquidation?
• Do the filed accounts exist for recent years, and did anyone read them?

None of these questions is adversarial. A developer who sells flats answers them several times a week and should have the documents ready without being chased. Where a company structure or a cross-border payment is involved, ask a Lithuanian notary, lawyer or accountant to look at the papers with you rather than relying on a public search alone.