On 19th March, the Bulgarian Government has drafted a Bill for amendment of the Commercial Register Act. It seems that finally the state is not blindfolded anymore. Some of the crucial amendments that are suggested are:

• The application for registration of a company and the application for reservation of name can be signed and submitted by lawyer registered in a Bulgarian bar association. This means that there will be no need that the principal of the company to be present in Bulgaria and to sign and notarize the applications anymore. Most of the documents will be able to be signed by the lawyer himself, acting on behalf of the principal using a power of attorney.
• When there is a change of the Manager or management body of the company, the new manager/management body is authorized by the law to submit the changes to the Commercial register. So far, there were problems, because the old law stipulated that the old managers obliged to submit the documents. Usually the old manager refuses to do that.
• Reservation of the company name will be for 6 months, opposing for the current 3 months.
• Reducing the required professional experience for registry clerks. So far the agency requires for the registry clerks to have at least 5 years of professional experience, but offers only 500(approx. EUR 250) Levs monthly salary, which is a kind of ridiculous for a person with professional experience more than 3 years.

Having this amendment effective will increase the personnel of the Registry Agency and it will process the documents faster. Let’s hope that this will significantly decrease the company registration timeline.