Company application on property dismissed

A constitutional application filed by Strickland Ltd against the Prime Minister and against the Minister and the Director of Social Accommodation has been dismissed by Mr Justice Raymond C. Pace in the First Hall of the Civil Court.

The company claimed that its fundamental human right to enjoyment of its property had been violated by the consequences of a requisition order on 10 apartments at Marshall Courts, Gzira.

Strickland Ltd claimed that as a result of the requisition orders and subsequent recognition of the tenants by court order, it was receiving Lm1,043 by way of annual rent for all the apartments.

This rent was controlled by law and could not be raised.

In 1994 the company had paid Lm5,350 by way of essential repairs to the apartments and it claimed that other necessary works were to be carried out, as the ceilings of the apartments needed to be repaired.

It was estimated that these works would cost Lm73,438.

The company claimed that it could only recoup a small percentage of these costs over a 10-year period, and the law stipulated that the amount recovered could not exceed twice the actual rent.

As a result, applicant company submitted that it would only be able to recover some Lm10,500 over this 10-year period.

In the event that the company sold the flats to the occupants, the selling price could not exceed the capitalisation of the current rent at six per cent of the actual rent payable.

Thus, the total price the company could obtain for selling these large apartments would be Lm16,000.

This, said the company, was in violation of its fundamental human right to enjoyment of property, for it was being excessively burdened.

The court was requested to provide the company with a remedy.

Respondents submitted that the rent laws provided a balance between the obligations of the owner to effect repairs and those of the tenant to pay the rent.

The company, said respondents, was not being deprived of its enjoyment of property, but was subjected to control on the enjoyment of the property.

In its judgment the court noted that it was not being asked to decide upon whether the laws violated the company's human rights.

What the company was attacking was the factual situation whereby its property had become a nightmare, for not only was the company not enjoying the property and profiting from it, but it was having to pay large sums of money for the necessary repairs.

According to the general principles of the rent laws, the owner was obliged to carry out extraordinary repairs.

The court had therefore to examine the nature of the repairs that the company had to carry out and to see what had caused the need for the repairs.

The majority of the works that had to be carried out were, according to reports filed by the company itself, necessary as a result of bad workmanship during the original construction.

It was therefore the owner's responsibility to carry out these repairs.

Furthermore, the limitation on the rent that the owner could request from the tenant applied only in the case where the repairs had already been carried out.

In this case it resulted that the majority of the works had not yet been carried out.

There was therefore a difficulty with the company's own constitutional application, for the company had made it clear that it was not attacking the validity of the rent laws but was only attacking a state of fact that had not yet, said the court, come into existence.

The company's application was therefore declared by the court to be untimely, and was dismissed.