Cap. 55 ст. 55Custody and safe keeping of acts.

(1) Every notary must with all due care and diligence keep in a safe place the acts received by him with the relative annexes until he shall have deposited the same in the Archives as provided in this Act.

(2) For the purposes of sub-article (1) the notary shall bind in volumes, in chronological order, all the acts received by him in the course of a year, affixing on the margin of each act a progressive number; each annexe shall have a distinguishing alphabetical letter.

(3) All the written pages of the said acts received in the course of a year and of the annexes thereto shall bear a progressive number:

Provided that where any of the written pages or annexes bears a similar progressive number, the notary shall either rectify the error and initial the correction or add to the page number a distinguishing alphabetical letter which he shall initial. In the latter case, he shall at the end of the volume make a signed declaration referring to the pages where such letters have been added and shall state that he has done so to avoid duplication in the volume’s pagination.

(4) Public wills, however, shall be bound in separate volumes, and those received in the course of a year shall likewise bear in the margin of each a progressive number, and all their written pages and annexes shall also bear a progressive number:

(5) The volumes of public wills shall be kept separate from the other volumes, and under lock and key.

(6) Both in the minute-book and in the register, a blank leaf cancelled on either side by two transversal lines must be left between the end of one public will and the beginning of another.

(7) (a) Both wills and acts inter vivos shall be numbered within twenty-four hours of the execution thereof.

(b) The numbering of the written pages and annexes, if any, shall be made within twenty-four hours of the execution of a will, and within thirty days in the case of any other act.

(8) Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act and any other law, the notary may, for the purposes of sub-article (2), hand over to a binder the original acts and wills, their annexes, indexes and registers to be bound as required by this Act: Provided that the notary shall at no moment release contemporaneously from his possession the originals and their respective registers.

(9) The Minister responsible for notarial affairs shall by regulations made after consultation with the Notarial Council prescribe the conditions under which a notary may hand over the documents mentioned in sub-article (8).