In Costa Rica, law recognizes a wide range of organizations types: general and limited partnerships, capital stock corporations, and individual enterprises of limited liability, trusts, foundations, civil associations and cooperatives. All these entities are recorded under the Mercantile Registry Section of the Public Registry of Costa Rica and the articles of incorporation have to be signed by the founding members/shareholders and notarized by a Costa Rican notary public in the protocol book. When incorporate an offshore company is Costa Rica a Constitutive Charter must be submitted, document which contains the laws which will regulate the day to day operations of the offshore company or the by-laws of the company – the documents must be signed by the directors and shareholders of the offshore company. Before the submission of the documents there must be published and advertisement in the official newspaper of the country ‘La Gaceta’ in order to announce the formation of the offshore company in the tax haven, procedure that takes between 10-15 days.
Foreign companies may operate legally through local branches, joint-ventures, wholly-owned subsidiaries and other dissimilarities on the known organizations.
Sociedad de Responsabilidad Limitada or LTDA. (Limited Liability Company “LLC”) is one of the most used types of company. This company has characteristics of a corporation and of a limited partnership. Therefore the liability of the company members is limited to the sum of quotas that they subscribe.
Taking into consideration that offshore company activities are carried on outside of Costa Rica, the offshore company will not be subject to any income taxes therein. Also the jurisdiction has no Double tax treaties signed, thus no information exchange regarding the goods and services transferred and no reporting or accounting requirements for a Costa Rica offshore company.
Also Costa Rica jurisdiction is very well known for online casinos business that had choose Costa Rica as registration country because of the fact that there are no direct prohibition on gambling business and no necessity to receive a special license, just to activate the gambling activity on company profile.
Costa Rica jurisdiction is not a member of Hague Convention and therefore this complicates the legalization of the corporate documents if the company plans opening bank accounts or representative offices outside Costa Rica. The cost to legalize the company documents depends on the specific countries Consulates rates.
A Costa Rica offshore company is exempt from any kind of taxation and is empowered to conduct all types of business and may have clients, contractors, suppliers and employees from any country.
