Although Act No. 340/2015 Coll., on the Contracts Register, as amended (the "Act") came into force on July 1, 2016, its Articles 6 and 7 on the penalties for breach of the duty to announce a contract in the Contracts Register only took effect on July 1, 2017. From this date onwards, contracts that must be announced via the Contracts Register will only come into force upon this publication. If a contract must be made public through the register and no such announcement occurs within three (3) months of its conclusion, it will be null and void from the very beginning.
The Act allows for an exemption from the above penalties in two cases. A contract will not be cancelled if only part of it was not disclosed in the Contracts Register or if the announcement wrongly left out certain metadata in order to protect business secrets; in both cases, the exemption will only hold if the situation is remedied within the set deadline. Regardless of whether it is announced in the Contracts Register, a contract will be enforceable if it was concluded in order to avoid or mitigate imminent harm related to an extraordinary event under the Act.