You are three weeks into a senior backend hire in Minsk. The candidate is strong, the offer is drafted, and your recruiter comes back with an awkward message: the standard reference-check request you sent through — the same one you use for every senior hire — is creating friction. The candidate is offering different referees […]
If you are evaluating Belarus as your next R&D hub, back-office location, or talent pool, you will quickly notice something: most of the market research online was written for someone else. Generic country reports, macro PESTEL analyses, and vendor pitch decks do not answer the questions a CFO or Head of Expansion actually asks before […]
The conversation usually starts the same way. A senior engineer asks for a one-on-one, closes the door, and says they’ve been talking to another company. Sometimes there’s a written offer attached. Sometimes there isn’t. Either way, the next forty-eight hours will decide whether you keep one of the people your team can’t easily replace — […]
Most international groups that own a Belarusian subsidiary aren’t physically in Minsk. The headquarters sits in London, New York, Dubai, Singapore, or Berlin. The CFO checks in over Slack, the board reviews quarterly numbers in a dashboard, and the only people on the ground are the engineering team, an accountant, and whichever statutory officers the […]
Most IT companies operating in Belarus pay competitively in cash. That part is easy. The harder question — and the one founders, HR directors, and finance teams keep landing on — is what happens beyond the paycheck. Stock options, equity grants, RSUs, phantom shares, multi-year performance bonuses: all standard tools in San Francisco, Berlin, or […]
Almost every High Tech Park resident in Belarus is, in financial terms, a foreign-currency business with local-currency obligations. Customers settle invoices in USD and EUR. Salaries go out in Belarusian rubles. Taxes — including the HTP’s headline 1% on gross revenue — are paid in rubles. Office leases are usually denominated in dollars or euros […]
When founders look at the post-Soviet space for an engineering base, two destinations come up almost every time: Belarus’s High Tech Park and Armenia’s Engineering City. They get grouped together in pitch decks, slide-deck comparisons, and investor calls — usually under a heading like “tech-friendly jurisdictions.” The grouping is misleading. One is a country-wide tax […]
Closing an HTP-resident company in Belarus isn’t the kind of project you finish in a long afternoon. It’s a regulated multi-stage procedure that touches the tax authority, the social protection fund, the HTP Secretariat, your bank, your employees, and — if you don’t sequence it properly — your personal liability as a director or founder. […]
Every company registered in Belarus needs a virtual office. That part isn’t negotiable — the registration authority won’t process an application without one, and the address sits in the company charter, in the state register, and on every official document the entity ever produces. What is negotiable is how you get it. You can lease […]
For an IT company operating in Belarus, multi-currency isn’t an edge case — it’s the normal week. You invoice a US client in dollars, pay a Lithuanian contractor in euros, settle a marketing bill in Russian rubles, and run domestic payroll in Belarusian rubles before the month closes. Four currencies in fourteen days is a […]
For IT companies looking at Belarus, the High-Tech Park is the prize that makes the rest of the paperwork worth doing. A 1% unified tax on revenue, no VAT on exports, zero corporate profit tax on qualifying activity, and payroll contributions tied to the national average wage instead of actual salaries — the combined effect […]
Belarus was one of the first countries in the world to give cryptocurrency a clear legal home, so it’s a fair question for any tech company hiring there: can you simply pay your developers in Bitcoin, USDT, or your own token? The honest answer is “sometimes, in specific ways, and almost never the way people […]
