With just under 1.4 million companies, Greece becomes OpenCorporate’s 124th jurisdiction. This data comes from Greece’s General Electronic Commercial Registry (GECR), known locally as Γ.Ε.ΜΗ. or GEMI.
Data attributes
Some details of the fields available in OpenCorporates in this dataset:
- Company Number
- Company Name
- Alternative Name – Trading Name
- Company Type
- Current Status
- Registered Address
- Branch flag – “F” for Foreign branches of non-Greek companies
- Incorporation Date
- Identifiers – ΑΦΜ (Taxpayer Identification Number)
- Company Website
- Filings
- Retrieved Date
Additional notes for data attributes
- Company names – the majority of names are in Greek, with some additional trading names which are often in English / Latin characters.
- Company Type & Current Status – based on the English translated values, plus original Greek
- Coming soon – Officers – in the past few days, company officer data has been made available at GECR, we will shortly start our work to include this information in our dataset.
Branches
GECR requires companies to register local (in-country) branches and establishments. We have excluded these from our scope as they do not have distinct enough legal personality from the parent company in the same jurisdiction.
We do include foreign branches of overseas companies.
Company numbers
Research carried out with our community partners has unveiled some unpublished (but interesting) information about the company numbers used in Greece.
The 12-digit numeric company numbers issued by GECR consist of three parts:
- Digits 1-7 consist of an incremental identifier for the company
- Digits 8-9 identify the registration body or regional Chamber of Commerce that registered the company (numbers between 00-60)
- Digits 10-12 identify the main company (“000”), and any branches (“001”, “002”, etc.)
To illustrate this, the number for 121753801000 (INTERSPORT ATHLETICS Ανώνυμη Εμπορική Εταιρεία) shows that the company has had 1217538 as its sequential number, that it is registered with the Athens Chamber of Commerce & Industry (“01”), and that it is a company (as opposed to being a branch). It has 5 registered local branches (numbers ending in 001 to 005, which can be seen on the GECR website) which reflect its trading footprint in the Attica region of Greece.
Foreign branches of overseas companies can be identified by the fact that they only have a suffix of “001” (to denote that they are a branch for tax registration purposes), and do not have an accompanying “000” company registration. For example, 139459101001 (BENEFITS SCIENCE Ε.Π.Ε ΥΠΟΚΑΤΑΣΤΗΜΑ ΕΛΛΑΔΟΣ) has only a single “001” GECR registration entry. This entity is a foreign branch of Benefits Science LLC, registered in Texas.
With thanks to…
What we do at OpenCorporates would not be possible without the help and expertise of a wide network of collaborators and supporters.
So here’s a big ευχαριστώ to our friends Evangelia Kampouri and Michalis Vafopoulos and their network of friends and colleagues who carried out research, helped with translations, and patiently answered all our questions!
Photo: © Ksenia Bramley via 500px.com (CC BY 3.0)
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