Company Records for New Caledonia, on demand

New Caledonia keeps its own register of commerce and companies. It sits outside the French Registre national des entreprises, which INPI states applies to every business on French territory except French Polynesia, New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna. Under the Code de commerce as applicable in New Caledonia, the Registre du commerce et des sociétés (RCS) is a service of the Direction des Entreprises, de la Consommation, de l'Attractivité et des Télécommunications (DECAT) of the Government of New Caledonia, dedicated to receiving mandatory formalities and keeping the deeds filed by businesses so as to attest their identity and exact legal situation. The Cour d'appel de Nouméa states that the register, where traders are required to register, is found at the greffe of the Tribunal mixte de commerce, whose seat is in Nouméa and whose competence covers the whole of New Caledonia; working with that court, the RCS carries out the legal check, records formalities, keeps the filed deeds and makes them available to the public as a paid service.

All commercial companies, civil companies, economic interest groupings and groupings under local law, and individual commercial businesses are entered in the RCS. Formalities are lodged through the business formalities centres of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Chamber of Trades and the Chamber of Agriculture, or directly with the RCS service, and since 2 August 2017 every entity registering in the RCS must also file a declaration of its beneficial owners with the RCS, with entities already registered given a period to regularise. Businesses and their establishments also carry a RIDET identifier in the Répertoire d'Identification des Entreprises et des Établissements maintained by ISEE, the statistics institute of New Caledonia, which issues a RIDET status notice online unless the holder has asked not to be listed publicly.

The RCS issues the extrait Kbis, an official document with a legal validity of three months that attests the legal existence and situation of a company, together with copies of company deeds such as articles and general-meeting minutes, copies of annual accounts filed within the past four years and statements of registered charges. Only the RCS is competent to deliver Kbis extracts, copies of deeds and accounts and charge registrations. The Kbis is accessible to anyone who requests it, and the Infogreffe.nc service deployed by the RCS allows company searches and certified information online.