Privacy notice
This notice covers the public register search only. It describes what this website publishes, what it records about visitors, and who to ask about either.
What this site publishes, and why
This is a search over Namibia’s business register. For each registered entity it shows: the entity’s name and every former name, every registration number it has held, its type, its incorporation date, its registered office address, its lifecycle status where that is on record, and whether it has met its beneficial-ownership filing obligation.
Registration of companies and close corporations, and the beneficial-ownership filing obligation, arise under the Companies Act 28 of 2004 (s.122A) and the Close Corporations Act 26 of 1988 (s.16A), as amended in 2023, together with the Financial Intelligence Act 13 of 2012. A business register is a public record: an entity is not removed from it by request, and an entity that has ceased to exist is marked deregistered rather than deleted.
The registered office address
A registered office is an entity’s statutory service address — the address at which it can lawfully be served with documents — and it is published as part of the register. For a small business that address is sometimes a person’s home. If that is your situation, the address is published because the entity gave it to BIPA as its service address; changing it means changing the entity’s registered office with BIPA, which this site cannot yet do.
What this site never shows
Beneficial owners are never shown here. The law makes an owner’s full name and the extent of their ownership available for inspection on request — that request goes to BIPA, which holds the register. This site does not publish them. Everything else BIPA holds about an owner — their date of birth, identity number, addresses, contact details and nationality — is not public at all, and sits with BIPA and the Financial Intelligence Centre.
This site will tell you whether an entity has met its filing obligation. It will never tell you who owns or controls it, how many owners there are, or anything from which either could be worked out.
Also never shown: the names, identification numbers, dates of birth or personal addresses of directors, members or officers; and the entity’s own email address and telephone number. There is no way to search this site by a person’s name — no such route exists. Note the honest limit of that promise: many Namibian businesses are named after their owners, so searching a person’s name may well surface companies bearing it. The guarantee is that no route searches person records, not that no person can be found.
What this site records about you
If you allow it, this site records which pages you visit and what you search for. You are asked once, and searching works whether you agree or not. Nothing is recorded until you say yes, and if you say no we delete anything already held for you rather than merely stopping.
What that record contains. A random number stored in a cookie on your device, which pages you opened and when, what you typed into the search box, roughly where you are (the first three parts of your network address, which identifies a region and not a subscriber), and which browser you used. Not your name, not your account, not your full network address. If you clear your cookies you become a new visitor to us.
Why. So BIPA can see what this register is failing to answer — searches that repeatedly find nothing are companies people cannot find, or things this site should explain and does not.
How long. 90 days, after which it is deleted. It is never sold, never shared, and never loaded from or sent to a third-party server — there is no advertising network and no external analytics service involved.
You have not agreed to be counted. Nothing is being recorded about your visits, so there is nothing here to withdraw.
One security cookie, on pages with a form. Any page that
can submit something to us — the cookie question above, an access request,
an objection — carries a random token so that another website cannot submit
it on your behalf without your knowledge. That token is stored in a cookie
named csrftoken. It holds no name, no account and no record of
where you have been, it is not read by any script, and it is not used to
count you. It is set whether or not you allow the counting above, because
the alternative is a form that can be forged.
One counter, briefly. To keep the register available and to make bulk copying difficult, the site counts how many requests come from a given network address in a short window. That counter stores a keyed cryptographic hash of the address, not the address itself, and holds no search term, no page, and no time of day beyond the window it covers. It is deleted when its window closes — at most 1440 minutes at the limits this site currently runs. It is honest to call this pseudonymisation rather than anonymisation: what limits it is the deletion, not the hashing.
Because the counter expires that quickly and holds nothing but a count, we could not tell you whether it ever held anything about you without being handed your address and hashing it — which would be more processing than the record itself represents. By the time you could ask, nothing about you is retained.
What a filing records about a person
A statutory form asks for more than an account does, because the Acts require the register to hold it. A CM29 — the return that changes who holds office — asks for a director’s identity number or date of birth, their residential, business and postal addresses, their email address and their contact number. Section 223(1)(a)(i) of the Companies Act requires the register to contain those three addresses; it is not something this service chose to collect.
Who can see it. The company’s own authorised users, and BIPA officers whose function requires it. A director’s identity number, date of birth and addresses are shown only to the registrar reviewing the return — not to every officer with a login.
Documents you attach. A certified identity copy, a signed consent, a resolution, or a bank receipt proving you paid. These are held outside the public web root, readable only to the officer who may decide the thing they support, and every time one is opened, the officer must say why and that reason is recorded permanently alongside their name. A refused attempt is recorded the same way.
What is not checked. Nothing here verifies a document or a declaration. Saying you have paid does not clear what you owe: payments are matched against the bank statement, and a short payment does not settle a duty.
If you create an account
You do not need an account to search this register, to check a company’s status or to verify a certificate. You need one only to start a business — to check a name against the Registrar’s guidelines, reserve it, and lodge a founding statement.
What is held. Your name, your email address, and your password stored as a one-way hash that nobody here can read back. Nothing else. No identity number, no address, no telephone number — those are asked for on a statutory form, if and when you lodge one, and what happens to them then is described above.
What the account can reach. Only what you start with it. It is not attached to any existing company, and it cannot be: a company already on this register is linked to a person by a BIPA officer who has seen identity documents, and no account can add one to itself. That is what stops somebody else claiming yours.
No email is sent, and no address is confirmed. This service does not send mail. Nothing arrives in your inbox when you create an account, and we have not checked that the address belongs to you — which is safe here only because the account confers nothing until a registrar accepts something you lodge.
How long it is kept. It is kept. BIPA’s records are retained under a file plan approved by the National Archives of Namibia, so whether an account that never registered anything may be disposed of is BIPA’s question to settle with the National Archivist, not a period this website invents. If you want yours removed, ask BIPA below and they will tell you what they are able to do.
Who else sees it. Your account is never published, never searchable, and never shared with any other company: this service uses no analytics processor, no email provider and no third party on this page. It is shown to one group of people, and this is deliberate — anyone who already holds the same company you do sees it on that company’s own access page, because a company that cannot see who is able to file on its behalf cannot notice somebody who should not be there. BIPA’s officers see it as well. Nobody else, and nowhere else.
How current this is
The register shown here was loaded from an extract dated 2 July 2026, covering the Khomas region only — 1 of Namibia’s 14 regions. Every status and compliance claim on this site is as at that date. A filing made since then is not reflected here.
Where this is held, and which law applies
This register runs on a server in Grand Est, France, and its backups are kept on that same server. There is no advertising network, no external analytics service and no third-party server involved in any page here — but the register itself, and everything you send to it, is physically held in France.
Holding the data in Europe does not, by itself, put this register under European data-protection law. The GDPR reaches an organisation established in the Union, or one that offers its services to people in the Union or monitors them there. A Namibian register serving Namibian businesses does neither. The rule that would have caught it — “use of equipment” in Europe — belonged to the older 1995 Directive and was deliberately left out of the GDPR.
The company that runs the server is bound by it, for its part. It may process what it holds only on our instructions, it must keep it secure, and it must tell us without delay if it is ever breached.
Namibia’s own Data Protection Bill is not in force. So no data-protection statute currently compels how this register treats your data. We have built to the Bill regardless — what is collected, how long it is kept and who can read it are written down and enforced in the software, not left to practice. A register holding people’s identity numbers and home addresses should not be waiting to be compelled.
Which country’s law finally governs a Namibian register held on European infrastructure has not been settled by a lawyer, and this notice does not pretend to settle it. It is written down for whoever is engaged. What does not depend on the answer: you can stop the counting from this page, what was collected is deleted when you do, and none of it is shared with anyone.
What you can ask for
These are not statutory rights in Namibia today. We offer them because they are the right answers, and because they will be required when the Bill commences.
- To see what is held about you. If you hold an account, most of it is on your own pages — including an account that holds no company, where the whole of it is your name and your email address. Ask BIPA for anything else, and for a copy you can keep.
- To have your account removed. Ask BIPA. What they can remove depends on what you have lodged: an account that never registered anything is a different question from one attached to a company’s statutory record, which the register has to keep.
- To have something corrected. Register data is corrected through BIPA, which holds the record — see below.
- To stop being counted. There is a button for it under “What this site records about you” above, if you have agreed to be counted. It stops the recording and deletes what was already collected, in one click and without your having to touch your browser settings.
What cannot be deleted, and why. A business register is a public legal record. An entity is not removed from it on request, and a company that has ceased to exist is marked deregistered rather than erased — that history is the point of the register. Filings, and the record of who made them, are kept for the same reason.
Who to ask, and how to correct something
Contact details are not yet published on this page. This system is in development and the formal position between BIPA, the Office of the Governor of Khomas and the team building it has not yet been settled in writing. Publishing a contact address before that is agreed would send people somewhere that cannot answer them, so this section states the gap instead of filling it.
This notice has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. It describes accurately what the software does — that part is checked mechanically, and the page changes when the behaviour does. Whether it says everything Namibian law will require of it is a question for somebody qualified to answer it.
In the meantime: if a compliance status or any other detail about your entity is wrong, or you have already filed and this page has not caught up, that is resolved through BIPA, which holds the register. This site cannot yet accept a filing or a correction.