Judgment No. 8745/2026 was recently handed down by the Athens Single-Member Court of First Instance. By that judgment, a payment order issued in respect of lease payments allegedly due under a finance lease agreement was set aside in favour of our client, a real estate asset management company.
More specifically, the Court held that the requirement of proof by documentary evidence governing payment order proceedings had not been satisfied. The statement showing the movements on the account relating to the finance lease agreement at issue, which had been submitted as evidence of the debt in question, had indeed been certified by a lawyer as a true copy; however, it did not bear a certification by the duly authorised employee of the applicant company—the respondent in the opposition proceedings—confirming that the document was a genuine printout from the company’s electronically maintained commercial books and records.
Consequently, the lawyer’s certification was ineffective and did not confer the requisite evidential value upon the document. This was because the certification had not been affixed to a copy of the original—namely, a document printed from a computer and bearing the above certification by the duly authorised employee—nor had the original document itself, as printed and issued by the respondent company’s duly authorised employee, been submitted.
The material findings of the judgment read as follows:
“The Applicant has duly produced and relied upon a true copy, certified by the duly authorised officer of this Court, of the copy of the extract from the account that was submitted in support of the application for the payment order under challenge and is held on file by this Court.
It is apparent from that copy that the copy of the account extract submitted when the payment order under challenge was issued did not bear the requisite certification, by the employee of the respondent company who produced the printout, as to the authenticity of that printout.
However, as stated above in the Court’s legal analysis, for a photocopy of an extract from electronically maintained books and records to constitute a certified copy of the original, the photocopied document—the extract produced as a computer printout—must bear a certification by the employee who produced it confirming the authenticity of the printout, and that certification must also appear on the photocopy. As set out above, that requirement has not been satisfied in the present case.
Moreover, the above extract constitutes an essential document for the issuance of the payment order, as it is the document by which the amount of the claim at issue is established.”
