MPR | Partners proposes amendments to draft bill on corporate law amendments related to covid-19

(i)    "document under private signature means a document which is written and signed by the parties, without the intervention of any state body and without authentication made by a notary public”;
(ii)    "electronic form means either a scanned form of a document under private signature or the form of a document to which a qualified electronic signature has been incorporated, attached or logically associated, in accordance with Regulation (EU) No. 910/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of July 23, 2014 on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market and repealing Directive 1999/93/EC, or an extended electronic signature, in accordance with the provisions of Law no. 455/2001 on electronic signatures".

(i)    the provisions of Article 67 of Annex no. 1 of April 14, 2020 to the Decree no. 240/2020 on the extension of the state of emergency on the Romanian territory - first emergency measures under direct applicability, according to which affidavits and signature specimens may take the form of documents under private signature or electronic form, during the state of emergency; besides such affidavits and signature specimens other documents such as those mentioned at point (iii) below require formalities difficult or impossible to implement in the current context;

(ii)    the lack of legal definitions for the phrases ”document under private signature” and ”electronic form” within the content of the above-mentioned Decree no. 240/2020;

(iii)    the practice of the Trade Registry Offices to also request, in addition to affidavits and specimen signatures, other documents in notarized form and/or with apostille (such as, for example, information excerpts issued by the competent foreign Trade Registry on the shareholders who are foreign legal entities);

(iv)    the difficulty and/or objective impossibility of undertaking the formalities for notarization and/or application of the apostille in the context of the pandemy caused by the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 and the disease caused by it, COVID-19.