LM Legal Services Blog

The Bulgarian government has approved the draft amendments to the Law for the Forests and has sent them to the parliament for voting. According to the draft amendments more than 100 state owned companies that look after the forests will be allowed to cut and sell timber. Until now only private companies have been doing this after participating in tenders. There will be preferences for strategic partners of the state in the tenders for the production of timber.
The amendments shall make the regulations concerning the process of constructing skiing slopes and lifts pretty lose. The current obligatory requirement to exclude the plots of land where the skiing slopes and lifts will be positioned from the forestry fund shall not be in force any more. However, this shall not apply to plots of land where wind power turbines will be constructed.

From February the new information system of the cadastre and the Land Registry will start functioning which will allow information for the  properties to be checked on the internet. However, these checks can be carried out only for properties which are on land included in the cadastre map, i.e. about 12% of the territory of Bulgaria. The rest of the land in the country must be included in the new registry by 2005 according to the government’s strategy.

Checks for the properties not included in the cadastre map shall be carried out using the old procedure – by the municipal departments for agriculture when it concerns agricultural land and by the municipal administration when it concerns urban territories.

The completion of the cadastre maps is in fact transfer towards a real system of land registry which consists of detailed information about the type of the land, the borders of the plot and its area.