Insights

Registro dei titolari effettivi — Italy’s UBO register

Fintech Passport

August 31, 2026 · 11-min read

Registro dei titolari effettivi — Italy’s UBO register

Italy has a beneficial ownership register that is legally sound, freshly re-legislated, and still switched off. The registro dei titolari effettivi has been suspended since May 2024. On 21 May 2026 the Court of Justice of the European Union told the Italian courts that the Italian model is compatible with EU law. On 23 July 2026 a new legislative decree rewrote the whole access regime. Neither event has switched the register back on. If your Italian onboarding runbook says “obtain a UBO extract from the registro imprese”, it is describing something that does not currently exist.

1. Three capacities, three different clocks

A payment or e-money firm meets the Italian register in three distinct roles, and the suspension does not affect them equally. Separating them is the first thing to do, because the litigation has frozen some and left others running.

Capacity	What it involves	Legal basis	Status now
As an Italian-registered entity or branch’s parent structure	Communicate your own beneficial owners, then confirm annually	Article 21 D.Lgs. 231/2007; DM 11 March 2022 n. 55	Suspended; filings accepted voluntarily
As an obliged entity performing due diligence	Consult the register during customer due diligence	New articles 21-ter and 21-quater D.Lgs. 231/2007	Blocked — accreditation not open
As an obliged entity that finds a mismatch	Report the discrepancy to the register	Article 21-ter D.Lgs. 231/2007; Article 24 Regulation (EU) 2024/1624	The EU duty runs regardless

That last row catches firms out. A closed Italian consultation channel does not suspend the directly applicable EU duty to report a discrepancy detected from another source — a shareholders’ agreement, a corporate chart, a notarial deed. It removes the comparison, not the duty to act on what you know.

2. What the filing obligation actually says

The substantive duty sits in article 21 of D.Lgs. 231/2007, and the machinery in the ministerial regulation adopted jointly by the economy and enterprise ministries, DM 11 March 2022 n. 55. The register became live only when a further decree of the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy of 29 September 2023 attested that the system was operational; first communications fell due within sixty days of that decree’s publication in the Gazzetta Ufficiale.

Four features of the Italian design differ enough from its neighbours to break a pan-European process:

Who files is named, not implied. The duty falls on the directors of capital companies and cooperatives, on the founders, representatives and administrators of private legal entities, and on the fiduciaries of trusts and of fiduciary mandates.
The filing cannot be delegated to an adviser. The obligated person files personally, which means that person needs a qualified digital signature of their own. In practice this is the single most common cause of a missed Italian deadline: the accountant who files everything else cannot file this.
New entities have thirty days from registration in the business register.
There is an annual confirmation. The information must be confirmed within twelve months of the previous communication, confirmation or modification. It may be combined with the deposit of the annual accounts, which is how most companies will want to run it — but that convenience does not change the twelve-month clock if the last event was a modification in, say, March.

3. Why the register is switched off

Trust companies challenged the regulation, principally over the decision to treat the Italian mandato fiduciario as an arrangement similar to a trust. The chronology matters because each step suspended something different:

April 2024 — the Regional Administrative Court for Lazio dismissed the challenges.
17 May 2024 — the Council of State, by ordinanza n. 3533/2024, suspended the effect of that dismissal, and with it the operation of the beneficial ownership section.
15 October 2024 — by ordinanze nn. 8245, 8246, 8247 and 8248, the Council of State referred six questions to the Court of Justice and stayed the proceedings. The suspension covered the DM 55/2022 deadlines, the application of penalties for late or omitted filings, and the accreditation and consultation machinery.
28 November 2024 — a ministerial note (prot. 115836) confirmed that the chambers of commerce may nonetheless continue to receive initial communications, changes and annual confirmations.

That note is why the position is easy to misread. The portal accepts filings; nothing compels them, nothing penalises their absence, and nobody outside the authorities can read them. As at the chambers’ own notices of August 2026, the communication obligation, the periodic confirmation, penalties, sample checks and third-party access all remain suspended, and the next Council of State hearing is listed for 2027.

4. What the Court of Justice actually decided

On 21 May 2026 the Court gave judgment in Joined Cases C-684/24 and C-685/24. Four holdings are worth reading precisely, because they close the questions that had been used to argue the Italian scheme was unlawful:

Legal certainty. Article 31(1), (2) and (10) of Directive (EU) 2015/849 as amended is valid. The Court held that the regulatory technique chosen by the EU legislature defines the scope of national discretion with sufficient precision given the subject matter.
Fundamental rights. Public access to beneficial ownership information provided there is a legitimate interest is compatible with Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter. The qualifier is the whole point: it is the legitimate-interest filter, not transparency itself, that makes the regime proportionate.
Fiduciary mandates. Italy may treat trust mandates concluded with Italian trust companies as “other types of legal arrangements” under Article 31(1). The absence of any transfer of ownership does not preclude that categorisation.
Who decides exemptions. Article 31(7a) permits the task of ruling on exemptions from access to be given to the chambers of commerce — non-judicial administrative bodies — but where an exemption is refused, the beneficial owner must be able to obtain interim legal protection.

The judgment removed the legal obstacle without removing the procedural one. The Council of State must still dispose of the cases in line with those principles, and until it does, the suspension it ordered stands.

5. The access regime that now exists on paper

D.Lgs. 10 June 2026, n. 122, published in Gazzetta Ufficiale n. 156 of 8 July 2026 and in force from 23 July 2026, transposes articles 11, 12, 13 and 15 of Directive (EU) 2024/1640. It inserts a new block of articles — 21-bis to 21-septies — into D.Lgs. 231/2007 and separates access by category:

Article	Who	What they get, and for how long
21-bis	Authorities — the finance ministry, Banca d’Italia, IVASS, CONSOB, the financial intelligence unit, the anti-mafia investigation directorate, the Guardia di Finanza, judicial authorities, and EU bodies including AMLA, the EPPO, OLAF, Europol and Eurojust	Direct and unfiltered access
21-ter	Obliged entities, in support of customer due diligence	Accreditation with the chamber of commerce, valid two years from first accreditation or express renewal
21-quater	Persons with a legitimate interest in the fight against money laundering	Name and surname, month and year of birth, country of residence and citizenship, and the condition of control. Journalists, non-profit bodies and researchers also obtain historical information and a description of the ownership structure
21-quinquies	Procedure for legitimate-interest requests	Decision within twelve working days, extendable by further twelve-day periods where volumes are exceptional; authorisation valid three years; legitimacy re-verified every eighteen months
21-sexies	Exclusions	Access refused where consultation would expose the beneficial owner to disproportionate risk — fraud, kidnapping, extortion, harassment, violence, intimidation — or where the owner is a minor or legally incapable
21-septies	Fees	Registry fees under the ministerial decree of 20 April 2023, updatable by further decree

Two observations for anyone maintaining a European access map. First, none of this is usable yet: the access modalities take effect only once the ministry has updated the technical specifications and confirmed the system operational. Second, the numbers are familiar: twelve working days to decide, three years of validity — the same figures France set in its own 2026 implementing decree, because both implement the same AMLD6 access template. An EU UBO register is now a credential with an expiry date, and the expiry dates are converging.

6. Three situations, and what the practitioner does

Scenario 1 — the Italian subsidiary whose directors have never filed.

Facts: an EU payments group has an Italian S.r.l. Its two directors are non-resident and have no Italian digital signature. Nothing has ever been filed, because the deadline was suspended before anyone got to it.

What the rule says: the obligation and its penalties are suspended, so there is no live exposure today. But the duty sits on the directors personally, cannot be delegated, and revives when the Council of State disposes of the case.

What the practitioner does: treats the digital signature as the long-lead item and procures it now, not when the deadline reappears. Then files voluntarily. Filing while filing is optional converts a future scramble across a group of entities into a routine annual confirmation, and it removes the one dependency — a personal credential for a non-resident director — that cannot be fixed inside thirty days.

Scenario 2 — a discrepancy found while the register is closed.

Facts: during onboarding of an Italian corporate customer, the file shows a 30% indirect holder through an intermediate company. The customer’s own declaration names only one owner at 60%.

What the rule says: you cannot consult the Italian register, so there is no register entry to compare against. Article 24 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 nonetheless requires an obliged entity to report a discrepancy without undue delay once detected, and article 21-ter now carries the domestic reporting duty for accredited entities.

What the practitioner does: does not record “no discrepancy — register unavailable”, because that is a finding you did not make. Records instead that the register was unavailable, that the ownership chain was reconstructed from the customer’s documents, and what the firm concluded. When accreditation opens, that file is a report waiting to be filed rather than an investigation to be reopened.

Scenario 3 — the group access map that assumes Italy works like France.

Facts: a compliance function has built a single European runbook step: “request register access, receive certificate, diarise three-year renewal”.

What the rule says: in Italy the obliged-entity route is accreditation under article 21-ter and lasts two years; the three-year figure applies to legitimate-interest authorisations under article 21-quinquies, re-verified at eighteen months. Two different instruments, two different clocks, in one country.

What the practitioner does: records the instrument type alongside the expiry date. An access estate tracked only by country and date will renew the wrong thing, and an accreditation that lapses stops due diligence rather than merely delaying a research request.

FAQ

Is the Italian beneficial ownership register open?

No. It has been suspended since the Council of State’s ordinanza n. 3533/2024 of 17 May 2024. The communication obligation, the annual confirmation, penalties and third-party access all remain suspended, and the chambers of commerce continue to accept filings only on a voluntary basis.

Did the Court of Justice reopen it on 21 May 2026?

Not directly. In Joined Cases C-684/24 and C-685/24 the Court upheld the validity of the relevant provisions of Directive (EU) 2015/849 as amended and confirmed that Italy could treat fiduciary mandates as arrangements similar to trusts. Lifting the suspension is a matter for the Council of State, whose next hearing is listed for 2027.

Should we file anyway?

There is a good case for it. Filings are accepted, the obligation cannot be delegated to an adviser, and the obligated individuals need their own qualified digital signature — a dependency that takes longer to resolve than the thirty-day deadline that will apply again.

Who has to sign the communication?

The directors of capital companies and cooperatives, the founders, representatives and administrators of private legal entities, and the fiduciaries of trusts and fiduciary mandates. Each files personally with a qualified digital signature.

What is the penalty for not filing?

Article 2630 of the civil code — €103 to €1,032, reduced by one third if the filing is made within thirty days of the deadline. Enforcement is currently suspended.

How will obliged entities get access once the register reopens?

Through accreditation with the chamber of commerce under the new article 21-ter of D.Lgs. 231/2007, valid two years from first accreditation or express renewal, and usable only in support of customer due diligence. The modalities apply once the ministry has updated the technical specifications and confirmed operability.

Does the discrepancy-reporting duty apply while access is blocked?

The EU obligation under article 24 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 to report a detected discrepancy is not suspended by the unavailability of the Italian consultation channel. What is suspended is the domestic accreditation and access machinery.

7. What to do, today

Find out whether your Italian entities’ obligated individuals hold a qualified digital signature. This is the dependency that will not compress. It is also invisible on any compliance dashboard.
File voluntarily now, and set the twelve-month confirmation clock. Align it with the annual accounts deposit if you can, but diarise it from the last communication or modification, not from the accounts date.
Stop recording “register unavailable” as a clean UBO check. Record the reconstruction and the conclusion instead, so the file supports a discrepancy report when accreditation opens.
Put the instrument type in your access register, not just the country. Italy runs a two-year accreditation and a three-year legitimate-interest authorisation with an eighteen-month re-verification, in parallel.
Watch the Council of State, not the ministry. The legislative work is done and the CJEU question is answered; what remains is a judgment lifting the suspension.