As you all may know, you could be represented by someone else in a General Assembly.

The Horizontal Property Law ( LPH) says in the first paragraph of the clause nº 15th that: “The attendance to the General Proprietors Meeting will be personal or by legal or voluntary representation, being enough writing signed by the proprietor to certify it. “

This proxy could be considered as a power of attorney for the owner to be represented in the meeting, being enough with a simple writing signed by the owner.

From the community point of view as long as the proxy is accepted in the meeting the vote will correspond to the proxy holder and everything he decides in the meeting will be as if it was decided by the owner himself. The problem may arise when the proxy holder has voted in a way that it is later not accepted by the owner.

It is even frequent that the owner has told the proxy holder to vote in an specific way and the vote in the meeting is just the opposite. In these cases, the owner will ask the administrator to change his vote but, unfortunately this will not be possible.

As we said above, the vote made by the proxy holder in the meeting will be considered as if it was made by the owner so, in the same way that the owner cannot modified his vote later, neither he can change the vote of his representative in the meeting.

This kind of dispute will have to be resolve between the owner and his representative and in case he has acted against the instructions given, the Spanish civil law allows the owner to ask to his representative for compensation for the damages he might has suffered as a consequence of his wrong vote.

Let´s suppose that the community wants to approve an extra fees to do some works in the pool area. The owner wanted to vote against but his representative voted in favour and everything was legally approved. The owner will not be able to change his vote and avoid the agreement approved or to contest this agreement in court as he legally voted in favour. All he could do is to start legal actions against his representative in the meeting in case he gave special instruction to vote against this agreement and the representative has acted in a different way.