At a time when the Lebanese live under daily pressure from bills, fees, and taxes, a new file appears from the “Notary Public” portal. The expedited, repeated draft law contained in Decree No. 2521, which is presented before the Finance and Budget Committee, does not appear to be an ordinary administrative detail. Rather, it may open the door to a significant increase in the cost of transactions needed by citizens in buying and selling, agencies, contracts, and permits. The project was included on the agenda of the Finance and Budget Committee session July 2after it had previously been discussed in committees and remains under study.
The numbers given are striking. The project proposes doubling some of the fees mentioned in the table attached to the Notary Public Law by 46 times, and doubling other lump sums mentioned in Article 33 by 60 times. This means, in practice, that fees that were considered normal in daily transactions may become more burdensome for citizens, especially in light of the decline in purchasing power and the absence of any actual correction of incomes.
The project does not stop at complications. It adds a fee of one per thousand to some contracts, with 70 percent of it going to the Judges’ Mutual Fund and the rest to the Cooperative Fund for Judicial Assistants. It also adds another fee of half a thousand for the Notaries’ Mutual Fund and Retirement Fund, thus turning the citizen once again into a source of funding for professional and judicial funds through every transaction he completes.
The background of the project is that “notary” fees lost their value after the financial crisis. According to the justification, the revenues from these fees amounted to about 73.876 billion liras in 2019, which was equivalent to about 49.25 million dollars, before reaching 55.338 billion liras in 2025, which is approximately 618 thousand dollars only. But the question remains: Will the revenue correction be through charging citizens a new bill, or through a broader approach that takes into account the situation of the people and the state together?
