Preparing letter of authorization

When you reside abroad but you wish to perform concrete & quick legal activities in Bulgaria, for example – to buy a Bulgarian property, or to sell your Bulgarian real estate here, or just to open a bank account and operate with it – then it is advisable to authorize a legal representative to do it. The way to do it is to sign & pass to them a written letter of authorization, applicable to the Bulgarian Civil Law (cause it will be used in Bulgaria). Bear that you only transfer rights to your proxy to perform activities on your behalf and for your account – for example, to sell your property, to receive the money on your behalf, to operate with your bank accounts and manage transfers, etc. Unfortunately in its nature, the Bulgarian letter of authorization itself only, does not create legal liabilities for the proxy towards the authorizer, neither the last could stipulate any legal obligations in it.

You need to know who you intent to authorize. Many authorizers overseas do not know or realize actually what precise rights they are giving legally to proxies when signing a letter of authorization towards a person who has not been contracted to them. Remember – the letter of authorization is not a contract; it consists of rights only; not terms & conditions; and it cannot oblige the authorized towards yourself. Unfortunately such misunderstanding and non-knowledge by authorizers, in some cases has led to fraudulent activities, performed by proxies, where at the end of the day the authorizers (usually foreign property buyers or sellers) have been left with empty hands and lots of occurred damages/expenses caused. Note it is quite risky to authorize a person who is not contracted to you and whom you don’t know (where you have no security if they will be doing business the next day or not), to deal with your legal matters in Bulgaria.

This is why in order to secure your interests and your investment, it is advisable either: - to authorize an independent Bulgarian lawyer with a power of attorney; The advantages of this option have been detailed precisely in our section Authorizing a Bulgarian lawyer and the most important are that a lawyer is actually contracted/liable to you via the power of attorney, their job is to protect your interests (instead of any other intermediaries/proxies) and the lawyers don’t cease business in a day; you can always get in contact with them; the lawyers keep their records/files and you can always get another original of your document on a later stage if needed.

The second option, where we may draw for you the text of a proper Bulgarian letter of authorization or power of attorney, that will suit your needs, having clauses which will follow the provisions of the local legislation and will avoid giving any unneeded rights towards your proxy (i.e. to avoid bases for any unauthorized usage of it by proxies), so you can rest assured that your interests are safe.

Instead of this, we can also examine & check a letter of authorization that someone has forwarded to you for signing, in order to confirm to you the above, or to amend it appropriately for you in order to protect your legal and financial interests. Please contact us for more details & quote on your case