“In November we moved the headquarters of our company. We did everything as the law dictates: online registration at the commercial registry office. Before moving forward, we explicitly asked if the pendency could block purchase and sale deeds. The answer was clear: no.
For four months we carried out several acts without any problem.
Until the end of February.
Selling a property with financing from Caixa Geral de Depósitos (a public bank), the pendency suddenly became an obstacle. The buyer’s bank demanded the annotation on the permanent certificate or a statement from the registry office confirming that it was only a change of headquarters.
What followed was an exercise in resistance:
– Telephone: no answer.
– Email: no response.
– The Almada registry office did not have access to the content of the pendency, the process had been automatically sent to Loulé, despite the company being registered in Almada.
The deed was postponed twice.
In the end, we solved it by dint of insistence and stubbornness. If we weren’t boring enough, I don’t know if we wouldn’t have run out of solutions in one of the multiples “only with appointment” or “the system can’t work”.
We believe in a strong state in the economy. But there is a huge difference between a state that catalyzes and a state that gets stuck.
We can talk as much as we want in simplexes and scans. If the machine does not modernize to a minimally functional standard, we will be left talking to the air.
The issue is not the intention. It is the execution.
PS: And this is an example of “national” systems. Our experience is that interacting with the municipal “machine” is Dante’s eighth hell.”
João Grilo via LinkedIn
