site.btaParliament Amends Code of Civil Procedure on First Reading, Curbing Powers of Private Enforcement Agents, Banks, Utility Monopolies

Sofia, July 7 (BTA) - Bulgaria's Parliament Friday unanimously passed on first reading four bills amending the Code of Civil Procedure, moved by GERB, BSP for Bulgaria, the United Patriots and Volya. The idea of the revisions is to curb the powers of private enforcement agents, banks and utility monopolies.

The amendments streamline the debtor summonsing procedure. The debtor must be looked for at least thrice at an address named by him, and one of these visits must mandatorily be on a non-working day. The court may check the respondent's address registration on its own initiative and verify his place of work when he is served care of the employer.

The debtor's unseizable income is pegged to the minimum wage. The debtor will have an option to stay the proceedings by an objection to an immediate enforcement order applied for by a bank and will be entitled to appeal an appraisal of a corporeal immovable furnished as security which is made by the enforcement agent.

To facilitate voluntary compliance, the statement of action, the judgment, the application for the issuance of an enforcement order and the enforcement order itself will have to state a bank account.

After the vote, National Ombudsman Maya Manolova, who initiated the revisions, expressed the hope that the amendments related to summonsing will be conclusively passed, so that people would not be found against by court without being aware of the proceedings. She also hopes that the enforcement methods will be proportional to the amount of debt, so that a person's entire property, bank account, labour remuneration and dwellings would not be garnished for a small debt of 100 leva. Manolova wants the appraisals of real estate to be appealable, lest the properties be auctioned off for peanuts, and the fees charged by private enforcement agents to be cut.

The GERB bill proposes giving the debtor an option to comply voluntarily with his obligation, with the first voluntary installment amounting to 20 rather than 30 per cent of the debt. In order to maximize the protection of the parties to enforcement proceedings, an expert witness will be appointed mandatorily when the price of the immovable property is set and when movable property worth over 5,000 leva is sold.

The Left propose an amendment to the Private Enforcement Agents Act, under which the sum total of all enforcement fees may not exceed the amount of the debt, and that the fee be waived in case of voluntary compliance in due time.

Volya move for a reduction of the pro rata stamp duty, so that the maximum amount of the fee would become half of the amount of the current pro rata fees.

The United Patriots' bill provides for standardizing the amount of the stamp duty on actions for restitution of title and on actions in personam. Changes in the cassation proceedings are proposed as well.

GERB's motion for an amendment to the Obligations and Contracts Act, intended to eliminate the figure of the "eternal debtor" by introducing an absolute 10-year extinctive prescription for natural persons, triggered a plenary debate. Danail Kirilov MP of GERB said that the idea is that the absolute extinctive prescription should apply both to the actionability and to the obligation itself. Filip Popov MP of BSP for Bulgaria noted that this is step in the right direction. Hamid Hamid MP of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms said that before the bill comes up for a second reading his parliamentary group will move for provisions that will put an end to the "eternal debtor" figure. Yavor Notev MP of the United Patriots pointed out that account should be taken of the fact that each debtor has a creditor.

Kirilov commented that he will oppose a disqualification of banks as execution creditors in enforcement proceedings. "This position is upheld by our entire financial and banking system," he added. In his words, banks are not just creditors but also custodians of depositors' funds.