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Liquidation of Bulgarian limited company

The biggest issue with the compulsory liquidation of the Bulgarian limited companies is the communication with the state appointed liquidator. Since the Registry Agency appoints liquidators from their liquidators lists, no one considers whether the company owner is foreigner or does he speaks Bulgarian. Some liquidators are not diligent enough when they see that the company owner is not Bulgarian. Sometimes they will not make efforts to contact the latter. One a separate note, this is difficult because the company owner address is spelled in Cyrillic letters and it is very difficult to restore the right English spelling.

Normally the the newly appointed liquidator will try to contact the capital owner(s) and request all company documentation i.e. contracts, bank account balance, court papers (if any), past years accounting reports etc. These will be needed to find out if the company has any outstanding debts and to repay them. Only then the rest of the company assets will be cashed and distributed among the company capital owners. Upon request of the capital owners and if available, any property left can be transferred to the company owner(s) without being cashed.

The latter is an exemption rather than a normal procedure. Therefore the company owners need explicitly and formally to request this transfer from the liquidator. If this request is not made in a formal way, the liquidator will sell the property on public tender/auction. As solicitors, we ensure that the formal request is submitted to the liquidator on time and no foreigner loses their property just because a formal request hasn’t been made to the liquidator.

Having said the above, I strongly encourage all Britons and Irish who still haven’t re-registered their companies – you still can keep your properties! The only effort you need to make is contact us with details of your Bulgarian limited company. We will take care of the rest.

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Bulgarian courts should accepts/send papers online

This week we have achieved a small victory. We are representatives of a client on a case, heard in Stara Zagora District Court. We have asked the judge to send by email copies of the latest hearing minutes. The judge refused, grounding her decision with “the court doesn’t have that practice”. We’ll that was not quite true. Art. 42 para 4 of the Civil Proceedings Code allows the court to send notices and subpoenas by email. We claimed that the court can use that to send copies of court documents too.

We have lodged an application to the Chairperson of Stara Zagora District Court, requesting the Chairman to “create such practice”. The court Chairperson accepted our arguments and ordered the judge to apply directly the aforesaid article. Yesterday we have received the requested documents by email.

I’m writing about this since that a major breakthrough in how the Bulgarian court operates. As I’ve said before, one of the major reasons of why lawsuits  take so long to be tried is the notice/subpoena problem. Electronic means solve this problem, but the the judges are reluctant to use them. There’s no explanation why.

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If your company is subject to compulsory liquidation

The deadline for re-registration has passed. Now all companies that have failed to meet the deadline will be liquidated. Most Britons have registered companies as holdings of their property in Bulgaria. the compulsory liquidation will put their properties on tender and will sell them before the company is closed. So what they can do?

Make sure you have someone to check your company file on a regular basis. This way you can find who is appointed by the Commercial register as a company liquidator. Once you know his details, you can contact him and discuss with him the options to transfer the property to the company owner without actually putting it on tender. This is one of the options the Commercial Act gives to the company owners i.e. instead of cashing the company assets, the liquidator can distribute the assets to the shareholders after he has paid the liquidation expenses, taxes and liquidator’s remuneration. you need to be persistent on this, since not every liquidator will agree to do it. Therefore it is advised that you hire a solicitor to negotiate on your behalf.

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Smartpartners-BG Ltd. declared bankrupt by Sofia City Court

Smartpartners-BG Ltd. – the developer of The Orchard, Bansko- have been declared bankrupt by Sofia City Court on 18.01.2012. The court resolution is sent by the court to the Commercial Register for announcing. It will be officially announced probably next week.

You can download the court decision in Bulgarian language from this link [PDF -1.1 MB].

As from the moment of announcing the court resolution, all creditors will have 1 month to present their claims to the administrator (through court). The court will review and decide whether to join the creditors or not. If they are allowed to join, they will benefit from all assets that are cashed by the administrator.

 

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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New changes to the transportation license regime is in force

The changes to Ordinance #11 2009 are finally adopted and promulgated in State Gazette. As from today most of the the new changes are in force. Some will be effective as from the start of next year. As I wrote before there was misinterpretation about these changes.

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Misinterpretation of the new changes to transport licensing in Bulgaria

It’s astonishing how journalists write about something that they don’t check thoroughly. A couple of days ago an article appeared in one of the major news websites for Bulgarian news in English language. The news is totally misinterpreted. They speak about promulgated new ordinance (regulation) which changes the transport company license regime, so that re-licensing is needed by the end of the year. The same news also appeared in Bulgarian and is distributed by a Bulgarian news agency.

This brings unnecessary fears to all owners of transportation companies. I have posted about the future amendments of the said regulation. The truth is that the amendments are not yet adopted by the Ministry of Transportation. A draft has been published on the Executive Agency “Automobile Administration”. The agency now has put this to discussion among the industry members. Few has already objected some of the amendments such as The Bulgarian Association of Freight Carriers. Their main concern is the new requirement for proving financial stability i.e. presenting company annual accounts, signed by certified financial auditor. The signature of certified auditor is not required pursuant the current regulations. The association thinks that this is contradicting with the Accounting Act which stipulates which companies are obliged to present annual accounts, singed by certified financial auditor.

The Association’s fears are ungrounded. The truth is that most of the transportation companies don’t meet the financial stability requirements and this new amendment will reveal this. No certified auditor will sign accounts that are not correct. But that’s not really a problem and I don’t understand why the association is making a problem out of it. If a transportation company doesn’t possess enough capital to meet the financial stability requirements, they just can sign an insurance policy that will cover the rest of the assets that the company is short of. In that sense the new amend mends are quite favourable, we just need to wait and see how much the insurance policy will cost.

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