Assessed risks and limitations when our client is using the SAP system in Russia

Our personal data protection team has advised the Russian division of a Chinese company which planned to use the SAP system. Our lawyers carried out a comprehensive analysis of the terms and conditions of the licence agreements for the SAP and submitted by the client in order to identify any possible limitations on its use in Russia and/or the transfer of rights under a sub-licence agreement. Moreover, our experts were involved in the technical aspects of using the system to determine how far it met the requirements of Russian legislation on personal data and accounting (with regard to personal data being processed in databases which are located in Russia). Our legal opinion reflected all the aspects of using the SAP system in Russia and featured practical recommendations for localising it in Russia.

The main difficulty of the matter was that, for the time being, there has been no practice of applying the requirements of Order No. 62n of the Russian Ministry of Finance dated 16 April 2021 “On approving Federal Accounting Standard FSBU 27/2021 ‘Documents and document flow in accounting’”. In this connection, in order to assess the risks, we needed to perform a deeper and more complex analysis of the requirements.