House of Representatives President Carlos 'Johnny' Méndez announced the filing of a bill that would require every government contract worth more than $500,000 to be signed and sworn before a notary public in person. The measure responds to the controversy surrounding the contract between the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and a consortium led by the company Power Expectations to provide temporary power.
That agreement, capped at $5.887 billion, was signed digitally and remotely. According to the bill’s Statement of Motives, the Legislative Assembly believes the best way to prevent such controversies is through clear legislation establishing two minimum guarantees for any contract the Government of Puerto Rico—any of its branches, departments, agencies or instrumentalities—enters with a natural or legal person: notarial swearing of signatures on high-value contracts, and submission of a corporate resolution authorizing the signer to bind the legal entity.
The penalty for failing either requirement would be absolute nullity of the contract, described as the most severe sanction in civil law, which prevents the contract from having any legal effect and cannot be later validated. Puerto Rico has witnessed controversies in government contracting that call into question the identity of those signing multimillion-dollar contracts and the actual authority they hold to bind the entities they claim to represent.