Legalization of Documents

The legalization of a document proves the identity of the undersignee. In Austria and for Austrian limited companies, only public notaries and in some cases the courts may legalize documents. Attorneys and/or auditors are not entitled to legalize documents.

A quite high number of documents which have to be filed with the company register need to be legalized.

In example, the sample signatures upon the shelf company’s registration a well as certain court applications and Powers of Attorney need to be legalized and even Apostilled and/or superlegalized, if the primary legalization was done outside of Austria (or Germany).

Thus, if a foreign shareholder wishes to buy shares in an Austrian shelf company (GmbH), quite some documents must be presented to the Austrian courts, most of them in legalized form.