The Law, inter alia, establishes the following main guarantees/preferences for investors entering into production sharing agreements with the Ukrainian government.

1. The Ukrainian government under production sharing agreements (the “PSAs”) secures the receipt of necessary licenses, permissions and other authorizations necessary to conduct exploration and extraction activities within the scope of PSAs.

2. The profit derived by a foreign investor within the scope of PSAs is exempted from Ukrainian corporate profit tax.

3. Transactions within the scope of PSAs are exempted from 20% Ukrainian value added tax (the “VAT”).

4. During import of equipment and other assets for the purpose of PSAs performance investors are exempted from both import VAT and customs duties.

5. Investors under PSA may not be subjected to Ukrainian foreign trade sanctions.

It should be noted that the Ukrainian parliament incorporated all presidential recommendations to the passed draft. It is therefore expected that the Ukrainian president will sign and publish the Law soon. The Law together with Law of Ukraine On Public Private Partnership will create viable legislative framework for investment activity in Ukraine under PSAs.

Size of the Companies House Register

There are more than 2 million companies registered in Great Britain with over 300,000 new companies incorporated each year. The Companies House statistics are available online, for example 26,782 new companies were incorporated in August 2009.

Company Information

The Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Data protection Act 1998 give people the right to see or receive information.

The Freedom of Information Act gives the public the right to see official information held by public authorities and includes information held by Companies House. The Freedom of Information Act came into force in 2005. It’s aim was to provide open up the information held by government departments and other public sector agencies. Companies House is an Executive Agency of The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) and is therefore included within the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Data Protection Act allows a member of the public to see the personal information that is held about them by organisations of all types, including Companies House. Organisations, including Companies House, that hold personal information are responsible for ensuring that the information is used fairly, is kept secure, is accurate and is up to date.

Companies House are therefore required to provide access to information. A request for information can be made on a formal basis. However, Companies House also provide a number of channels and subscription based servcies that provide easy access to company information. These include an online gateway and a XML gateway.

Quality of Information

Companies House is an information registry, it therefore relies that the information provided to it is accurate. Companies House limited it’s responsibility on the accuracy of information provided by stating:

Companies House is a registry of corporate information. We carry out basic checks to make sure that documents have been fully completed and signed, but we do not have the statutory power or capability to verify the accuracy of the information that corporate entities send to us. We accept all information that such entities deliver to us in good faith and place it on the public record. The fact that the information has been placed on the public record should not be taken to indicate that Companies House has verified or validated it in any way. (Companies House, September, 2009)

The function of Companies House is to receive, store and disseminate information from limited companies and certain other bodies.

If that information is known to be inaccurate, Companies House should be informed. Further information on reporting incorrect details and fraud to companies house an be found on the Reporting Fraud pages of the Companies House website.

Copyright

Companies House website advised the following (Companies House, September, 2009).

Copyright is usually owned by the person or organisation that created the work.  In the case of copyright works produced by civil servants, the copyright is owned by the Crown and qualifies for Crown copyright protection under section 163 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Government departments do not own copyright in their own right.

The material published by Companies House may be broadly split into two categories:

a) Material produced by Companies House
Material of this sort (e.g. guidance booklets) is subject to Crown copyright protection, and Companies House controls this copyright under a Delegation of Authority from the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (HMSO).  Crown copyright also covers database rights, logos and visual images.  Any Crown copyright protected material held by Companies House (other than the Royal Arms and departmental or agency logos) may be reproduced free of charge in any format or medium provided it is reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context. Where any of the Crown copyright items are being republished or copied to others, the source of the material must be identified and the copyright status acknowledged.  If Crown copyright is infringed, Companies House is authorised by the Controller of HMSO to take such lawful steps as may be required to rectify the situation.

b) Material on the public register
With the exception of a small category of material which is exempt from statutory disclosure requirements, the Registrar is required by law to make the information comprised in documents sent to him available for public inspection.  Information on the public register is made available by virtue of approvals issued by the Registrar in accordance with section 47 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and Schedule 1 of the Database Regulations (SI 1997/3032).  Companies House imposes no rules or requirements on how the information on the public register is used.

The Companies House copyright policy.

Re-use of Company Information

Companies House (Companies House, September, 2009) also advise that as a public information provider, it makes all information relating to limited companies available for public inspection.  It places no restriction on how the information is used after purchase other than the following:

• Customers must take their own legal advice regarding possible breach of third party copyright.
• Products sold in a bulk format or on CD/DVD-ROM may not be reproduced by the customer in the exact format in which it is presented.
• Customers cannot reproduce the Crown insignia or use the Companies House logo.
• If information is used from guidance notes, the website, publications or statistical tables the customer is required to credit Companies House as the source of the information.

With real-time becoming increasingly popular, then why are will still accepting search results for websites that have been indexed within the past year? If you create a new web site, post or comment it is not instantly accessible on the major search engines – despite many having the capability to index sites practically on demand. Will we ever get real time indexing and real-time searches?

I always use the Advanced Search Options on Google to select search results from the past day, week or month. This way I can see more recent and relevant results.

Google admit that they are “falling behind Twitter” and are potentially losing out to micro blogging sites that provide real time information. Google’s co-founder, Larry Page, has said that Google has been losing out to Twitter in the race to meet web user’s demand for real-time information (Guardian, 19th May 2009).

Twitter allows users to broadvast thei thoughts, actions and news instantaneously, while Google can take hours, days or even weeks to update content. “People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it,” Page said in a closing address at Google’s Zeitgeist conference in May 2009 . “I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.” (Webpronews.com)

What is available to satisfy user demand for real-time search?

Google does offer “nearly real-time search”. But, it is still dependent on the search engine’s  indexing routine. “Nearly real-time” search uses the QDR or Query Date Range trick.  Altering the QDR in a search query will create a different result set based on a time period. Look out for “&tbs=qdr:” in the search query.

e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=qdr:n30,sbd:1&q=news&btnG=Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK|countryGB

Canging the “&tbs=qdr:” prefix will change the time period of the result set. Adding n30 will show results from the last 30 minutes. Change that number to change the period of results. s30 will return results from the last 30 seconds! So we can have near real-time searches from Google. See more on the QDR trick here: http://blog.omgili.com/?p=108

Soople (http://www.soople.com/) makes it easy for you to do custom searches on Google.

There are also a number of new search engines that attempt to tackle searching from a different angle. Some of these are looking at real-time search. or at least to answer the question “what is happening on the Internet right now”? The new search engines and real time information gateways tend to concentrate on Social content – blogs, tweets, photos and videos – which tends to be the frequently updated source of web content.

Collecta (http://collecta.com/) monitors the update streams of news sites, popular blogs and social media.

IceRocket (http://www.icerocket.com) is pioneering commercial search by putting the interests and wants of consumers before advertisers. IceRocket has innovative blog search technology to search blogosphere (IceRocket, About, September 2009).

OneRiot (http://www.oneriot.com/) is a realtime search engine … “OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the realtime web.” (OneRiot, About, September 2009)

Scoopler (http://www.scoopler.com/) is a real-time search engine. We aggregate and organize content being shared on the internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. We do this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more. When you search for a topic on Scoopler, we give you the most relevant results, updated in real-time. (Scoopler, About, September 2009)

SocialMention (http://socialmention.com/) is a social media search platform that aggregates user generated content from across 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. (SocialMention, About, September 2009).

Business Management

Valetime provides operational management and support to internationally based facilities & associated foreign enterprises through UK based companies.

Such support includes the procurement of key raw materials and equipment, marketing, strategic planning, accounting, finance and legal services.

Supported companies benefit from a Western style to their operations and gain advantage through adopting the propriety, accountability and respectability offered by operations from a long established and visibly regulated jurisdiction in Europe.

Contact us to see how we can help your business through international corporate structrues and protect your business interests and investments.

Consultancy & Advisory Services

The origins of Valetime are in business & management consultancy bringing experience from early careers as professional advisors with major firms.

Early specialists in the development of business in emerging economies with emphasis on financial & management accounting. More recently, the emphasis has been on operations in a rapidly changing international scene and has been widened to include international operations, project management and agency services.

Contact us to see how we can help your business operate in the rapidly changing international business environment.

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Newenza Trading

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