If you live abroad and own property, run a business or have a case in Pakistan, sooner or later somebody will need authority to act for you. A power of attorney is that authority — and it is also the instrument most often abused against people in exactly your position.
Special, not general
The first and most important decision is scope.
- A special power of attorney authorises specific acts: sell this plot, appear in this case, collect rent from this tenant, sign this mutation.
- A general power of attorney authorises the holder to do more or less anything — including selling assets you never had in mind.
Give a special power of attorney unless there is an overwhelming reason not to. Name the property by its full description, name the act, and set an expiry date. A general power handed to a relative “to handle everything” is how people lose land they have never seen.
Attestation: the step that makes it usable
A document signed at your kitchen table abroad will not be accepted in Pakistan. The chain of authentication generally runs:
- Execute it before the Pakistani Embassy or Consulate in the country where you live, with your passport and CNIC/NICOP, and have the mission attest your signature. Many missions require your photograph on the document and two witnesses.
- Attestation in Pakistan by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which authenticates the mission's seal.
- Registration with the Sub-Registrar under the Registration Act, 1908 where the power relates to immovable property. Revenue authorities, housing societies and banks routinely refuse to act on an unregistered power for a property transaction.
Pakistan has also acceded to the Apostille Convention and given effect to it by statute, so for documents originating in a member state an apostille may take the place of the older consular-plus-MOFA chain. Practice is still settling in some offices, so confirm what the specific registry, society or bank will accept before you pay for attestation.
What to write into the document
- Your full details and the attorney's, with CNIC numbers, and photographs of both if the mission requires it.
- An exhaustive description of the property or matter — khasra or plot number, area, boundaries, society and phase.
- The exact powers granted, and an express statement of what is not granted. If the attorney may not sell, say so.
- Whether the attorney may receive sale consideration. Very often the answer should be no — direct payment into your own account removes the commonest abuse at a stroke.
- An expiry date, and a bar on delegating the authority onward.
Verify, monitor, and revoke properly
Do not treat the document as fire-and-forget.
- Ask for the record of rights (fard) in your name periodically, or the society's ownership confirmation. Land records in several provinces are computerised and can be checked without being present.
- If the power is no longer needed, revoke it in writing, register the revocation, and give written notice to the attorney and to every office likely to rely on it — the Sub-Registrar, the society, the bank. An unrevoked power is a live risk for as long as it exists.
- Never sign a blank or partly blank document, and never leave signed blank stamp papers with anyone.
If a power has already been misused
Act quickly and on more than one front: a suit for declaration and cancellation of the instrument under the Specific Relief Act, 1877, an application to correct the revenue record, and a criminal complaint for forgery and cheating where the document or the attestation was faked. Limitation runs, and a transferee who has since sold on to somebody else makes recovery far harder — which is why periodic checks matter more than any drafting.
General information for overseas Pakistanis, not advice on a specific transaction. Attestation requirements differ between missions and between the offices that will act on the document, and property practice differs by province. Have an advocate draft the power and confirm the attestation route before you sign.