If you are checking a Montenegrin counterparty — a seller, a developer, an agent's company, a prospective partner — the first instruction you will find online is to search the Central Registry of Business Entities at crps.me. Google still suggests that search.
Follow it today and you arrive at a page whose entire content is an offer to sell you the domain.
We checked on 28 August 2026. crps.me, pretraga.crps.me and pretrazivac.crps.me all answer on plain HTTP with the same thirty-kilobyte shell, titled crps.me, whose rendered text reads: "Buy this domain. | More domains at Seo.Domains". Over HTTPS they do not answer at all. The register did not disappear and nothing about the company you are checking has changed — but the address in a decade of guides, forum answers and law-firm blog posts now belongs to a domain broker.
This page sets out where the search actually is, what it will tell you, and — more usefully for a foreign buyer — what it will not.
Where it is now
The register sits with the Tax Administration of Montenegro, and the public search is a card on its IRMS portal:
`irms.tax.gov.me` → Pretraga registra → Pretraga subjekta
Direct address for the entity search, verified on 28 August 2026:
https://irms.tax.gov.me/public/search-register/business-entities
No account is required for that search. The portal does have a login, but it is for taxpayers filing returns and it authenticates with a qualified digital certificate, which a foreign buyer will not have and does not need for a lookup.
Two details worth carrying with you. The portal's own notice of 29 June 2026 names the register the Centralni registar privrednih subjekata i drugih subjekata — "and other entities" is now part of the name. And the search is protected by a bot check, so it answers a person in a browser rather than a script; if you have automated this in the past, it will not run unattended.
What you can search by
The public entity search takes five fields, and the last two are the ones a foreign investor should notice:
| Field on the form | What it means |
|---|---|
| Naziv privrednog subjekta | Company name |
| Registracioni broj | Registration number |
| PIB / Matični broj | Tax identification number / company number |
| JMB lica u društvu | Personal identification number of a person in the company |
| Ime i prezime lica u društvu | First and last name of a person in the company |
That fifth field is a person-to-companies search, and it is open to anyone. You can start from a name — the individual across the table, the person who signed the reservation form, the "director" on a business card — and ask which registered entities that person appears in. A great many European registers do not put that on the public side at all.
There is a second tab, Pretraga predmeta, which searches filings rather than entities, and an advanced search alongside the basic one.
What comes back
The results table is built from these columns:
| Column | What you learn |
|---|---|
| Reg. broj | Registration number |
| Promjena | Whether a change is recorded |
| PIB / Matični broj | Tax number and company number, for unambiguous identification |
| Naziv društva | Registered name — which is often not the trading name on the website |
| Oblik organizacije | Legal form: d.o.o., a.d., branch, entrepreneur |
| Šifra djelatnosti | Registered activity code |
| Status društva | Company status |
For a first pass that is enough to answer the three questions that matter before money moves: does this entity exist, is it the entity named in the draft contract, and is it in normal standing rather than struck off or in a procedure.
What the search will not tell you, and where those things live
This is the part that costs people money, because the search looks complete and is not. A registry entry is an identity record, not a health record.
| What you are used to checking | Not in the entity search — where it actually is |
|---|---|
| Filed accounts and financial position | Annual financial statements, published under the accounting law rather than obtainable from the entity lookup |
| Security over assets, charges, liens | The pledge register, indexed under the pledgor's name rather than under the asset — so you search the party, not the thing |
| Litigation exposure | Published court decisions, not a docket of pending claims; a live dispute may leave no public trace |
| Beneficial ownership | The beneficial owners register, which is a separate access regime, not an open lookup |
| Insolvency | Official gazette publication and the claim window that runs from it |
| Whether the property is what the contract says | The cadastre, a different institution entirely — the company register says nothing about the title |
We work through those layers, and how a foreign buyer reaches each of them, in our investor due diligence guide. If the counterparty check is really a property check, the ownership and encumbrance questions belong with the property due diligence checklist instead.
If you are used to another country's register
The reflex you bring matters more than the interface. Three common ones, and what replaces them here:
| Where you are from | Your reflex | What it maps to in Montenegro |
|---|---|---|
| United States | Secretary of State entity search plus a certificate of good standing | The IRMS entity lookup gives status; there is no single equivalent certificate, and a "good standing" letter is a tax-administration document rather than a registry printout |
| United Kingdom | Companies House: officers, filing history, charges, accounts, all in one free record | Split across institutions — identity at IRMS, security in the pledge register, accounts under the accounting law |
| Germany, Austria, Switzerland | Handelsregister extract as the authoritative single document | The registry extract identifies; it does not carry the encumbrance picture a Grundbuch-trained reader expects to find alongside it |
The practical consequence is the same in all three cases: a clean entity record is a starting point, not a clearance. Anyone who tells you a company "checked out" because it appears in the register has checked one of six things.
A note on what we are, and how we are paid
We take no commission from estate agents, developers or intermediaries, and we do not receive referral fees for introducing you to any of them. Our only income is the fee you agree with us, and it does not increase if you sign. That is a structural point rather than a promise: telling a client "do not proceed with this one" costs us nothing.
It matters here because everyone else in a Montenegrin transaction is paid out of the transaction. The agent's commission depends on the sale closing. The notary's duty runs to the instrument, not to your commercial position. When we pull the register entry, read the contract and put a reservation in writing, none of that is weighed against a commission we would lose.
We are Montenegrin lawyers. We can tell you what the register shows, what it omits, and what the omission means for the deal in front of you. We are not licensed investment advisers and do not tell you whether a deal is a good buy.
Before you send money
If you have a counterparty name, a company name or a draft contract, send it with one line about what you are buying and from whom. We will pull the register entry ourselves, tell you in writing what it shows and what it does not, and name the layer that still needs checking. That is a smaller piece of work than most people expect, and it happens before the deposit rather than after.
Write to us with the company name and the draft.
