By now, most everyone knows that in Real Life (if you can call it that) I work in the offshore banking industry. We do no banking in Uruguay–because it is slow, expensive and difficult–but we do have am administration office here.
As a normal part of our business we open financial accounts with various institutions around the world. Mostl of them require a notarized account opening document or signature card. In most places, even including the two islands on which I lived in the Caribbean, this is a piece of cake–here it is an indigestible lump of something I prefer not to describe in a family blog.
One cannot simply get one’s signature notarized here. The Government won’t allow. Instead, one must jump through a series of ever more expensive and difficult hoops in order to accomplish this erstwhile simple task.
We have been trying to open an account at a Bank in Poland to more easily load a new Visa card product we are getting ready to offer. ALL we need to complete it is to have two signatures notarized. But it CAN’T be done here. Escibranos, the local name for civil law notaries (although the law isn’t very civil at all) can’t just notarize a signature, they have to notarize the whole document.
And God-forbid that the document is in any language other than Spanish (like Polish and English maybe), the document has to be translated into Spanish. This means that I have the privilege of paying a public translator to translate an English-Polish bank account opening form into Spanish. I don’t yet know if they translate BOTH the English and the Polish–(probably they do so they can charge twice for the same translation).
Then the document can be notarized.
End of story; right? Wrong! Because Uruguay is one of a handfull of countries that to not subscribe the the International Convention on the Legalisation of Documents, Uruguay does not issue Apostilles, which are basically an internationally recognized super-notarization. Some other countries that do not have the Apostille include some important business centers as North Korea, Cuba, and Libya.
This means that the document has to be legalized before it can be sent to Poland.
So, after it is translated, and notarized, it must be sent to a court for review.
But we’re still not finished! Then it goes to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to finally be legalized.
But we’re not done yet. Now, it has to be taken to the Polish Embassy in Buenos Aires (because the Polish Embassy here is now closed), after which it can finally be sent to the Polish Bank.
Easy: US$500 and a month later, we have the document….
EXCEPT that the Court didn’t like two or three words in the notarization, so we had to start the process all over again.
NB: For those of you who might think that I missed the obvious solution of going to the US Embassy to get the signatures notarized, I didn’t. The Yankee Embassy will ONLY notarize documents intended for the US. And espite the grandiose ambitions of King Georeg II, Poland is not yet considered a part of the US (except in some parts of Chicago–or maybe it is the other way around? Chicago is considered a part of Poland…).
For those who want to know more about the Apostille, see: http://www.hcch.net/index_en.php?act=conventions.status&cid=41#nonmem
For the record, I am now halfway through the process–the court finally approved the documents. A two page account application is now 16 pages of “stuff” (in private I call it something else…
Now we only have to send it to the Foreign Ministry and then hand carry it to the Polish Consulate in BsAs.
With luck, we won’t have more than about 150 pages to send when they are all finished.
Left by southron on October 25th, 2008