Annuaire de législation haïtienne: the laws, decrees and arrêtés of 1917

The fourteenth year of the Annuaire, covering 1917 under Dartiguenave.

The volume carries the arrêté of 13 February 1917, published in Le Moniteur of 14 February, authorising the société anonyme formed at Port-au-Prince under the name Compagnie Haïtienne de Pétrole by public act of 12 January 1917, and approving its constitutive act passed before the notaries Louis Etienne Edmond Oriel and his colleague. It is taken under articles 29 to 37, 40 and 45 of the Commercial Code, on the report of the Secretary of State for Finance and Commerce. Article 3 makes the authorisation conditional: the tax referred to in articles 5 and 6 of the law of 13 September 1906 is to be understood not as the tax existing in 1906 but as the tax existing at the time, and must be paid on the whole quantity.

That condition is the substance. Authorising a petroleum company while restating the applicable tax at current rates protects the revenue against the common practice of pinning a fiscal regime to the date of incorporation, and it is an early Haitian instance of the stabilisation-clause question that still governs extractive and fuel-import concessions.

1917 is also the year the Legislature was dissolved, after which legislative power passed to a Conseil d'État; the 1919 volume in this series records that body's acts.