Hi all, my GV investment is with a fund managed by Heed Capital. They recently asked for a pile of documents to be submitted with certification. The thing that seems odd to me is that they’ve specified that the documents can be certified by a Portuguese lawyer, or apostilled abroad.
This doesn’t make much sense to me, since a PT lawyer would have no jurisdiction to certify a document that requires apostille, and also, many of the documents that they are requesting (bank account statements, employment contracts) are not even eligible for apostille.
Has anybody else gone through this with Heed, or other investment funds ? I’m curious if the person writing to me just has incomplete or inaccurate information.
I’m guessing they may be requesting certified copies, which I guess a Portuguese lawyer (or even notary public) could make if they have access to the originals.
But if that’s the case I’m not sure why they also talk about apostilles, which are meant to prove the authenticity of the documents themselves.
Hi Tomas. The same thing was requested of me as well a few months ago. I too found it strange that they would need updated certified copies of the same documents that were submitted in 2021. I ended up getting our lawyer to certify what was requested. Apostilling the documents wasn’t necessary. It cost in excess of €100 for her to do what they wanted, which was in itself somewhat annoying. I also had difficulty in submitting some of the specific items but Gustavo was able to come up with some workarounds.
Yes I’m in a fund managed by Heed Capital too. I just asked my Portuguese lawyer to certify the documents. I think Thomas is right in that where the original is a pdf (e.g. a bank statement) then that’s what they certify.
Originally, I was discussing with Heed having the documents notarised in Switzerland, where I live. (This was not raised as an issue, they only told me that they wanted Apostille outside of Portugal several steps later.)
The Swiss notaries will not certify anything that does not come from an original print - eg., they would not certify a PDF file or a signed document that does not have a wet-ink signature.
Following up on this, the reason I did not go with our GV lawyers is because they had quoted a document certification price of 175 EUR for the first page, and 50 EUR for each additional page. I’m assuming this was per document, and we had 6 documents requested by Heed. They are generally one of the most expensive ways we have found to get anything accomplished, following the initial outlay for handling our applications.
However, I was connected with another firm by a friend who seems more competent and responsive, and charged just 25 EUR per document (this may have gone up if any of the documents were unreasonably long, which ours weren’t). I would be happy to share the firm’s contact information via DM.
One might compare our lawyer’s firm to a disinterested and detached teenager or 20-something, who needs 2-4 reminders to do anything on your behalf, twists the interpretation of any agreement to their maximal benefit, and pops up occasionally asking for infusions of cash (without giving much in return).