It is one of the most natural assumptions a person can make about their own will: I signed it properly at home, it says who gets what, so that is what will happen — everywhere, to everything I own. For most of an estate, in most places, that assumption holds. Where it quietly breaks is […]
An international marriage spreads a couple’s life across borders almost without their noticing. One spouse is Belarusian and the other is not; they met in one country, married in a second, built a career in a third; there is a flat in Minsk, an apartment abroad, accounts in two currencies and a company somewhere in […]
Most employers assume that the hard part of hiring a foreign national in Belarus is finding the right person, and that the paperwork is a formality HR will sort out later. In practice, it is the other way round. The candidate is usually the easy part; things go wrong with the permit, the contract and […]
Almost everyone researching Belarus’s Hi-Tech Park (HTP) focuses on getting in: the profit-tax exemption, the 9% personal income tax, the visa and work-permit advantages. Far fewer think about how a company can lose that status — and that is the risk that actually bites. HTP residency is not a permanent title you earn once; it […]
For years, the dispute clause in a contract with a Belarusian company wrote itself. Arbitrate in London or Stockholm, under the rules of a familiar institution, and — thanks to the New York Convention — enforce the eventual award more or less anywhere the losing party kept money. It was close to a reflex, and […]
Foreigners looking at Belarusian property tend to make one of two assumptions: that they can’t really buy here at all, or that they can buy anything a local can, just as they would at home. The truth lies somewhere in between, and it turns on a distinction almost everyone misses: the building versus the land. […]
On 28 September 2026, Belarus’s High-Tech Park registered the country’s first two “crypto-banks” — a legal status that barely exists elsewhere. The headline invites two misreadings: that a crypto-bank is a crypto exchange dressed up as a bank, or a bank that has started holding crypto. In law it is neither. It is a purpose-built […]
When a contract with a Belarusian state-owned company goes wrong, the first question foreign creditors usually ask is about sovereign immunity. Can you actually take the company to court? Will it hide behind the government’s immunity and leave you with a worthless claim? The concern is natural, but in most cases it is the wrong […]
When a child cannot be raised by their parents — because the parents have died, have lost their parental rights or are unable to care for the child — someone else has to step in, and that person is usually a relative: a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, an adult brother or sister. Most people […]
People making a Belarusian will — or expecting to inherit under one — usually assume the will has the final say: whatever it says goes, and a testator can leave everything to anyone they choose. That is mostly true, but not entirely, and the exception has a name: the obligatory share. Belarusian law reserves a […]
Recovering a debt from a Belarusian company and recovering one from a Belarusian individual entrepreneur are very different exercises — and the second is usually easier, for a reason that takes most creditors by surprise. With a company, you worry about limited liability and the chance that the business is an empty shell. With an […]
People who married or divorced abroad and now have dealings in Belarus — a foreign couple relocating here, a mixed-nationality couple, a Belarusian who married or divorced overseas — often come to us with the same worry: that they must go through some Belarusian procedure to “make it count”, or that their marital status has […]
