@FlatChatFan said:So what can be done?
Good question – and I would respond by asking what it is that Slapped wants.
Does he or she want the Owners Corp to do the right thing, do they want them to do the best thing (not always the same) or do they want to punish the miscreant?
If this were my strata, I would be asking, first of all that a letter be sent to the Insurance company asking if they were satisfied with the outcome, if they planned to take any further action and if this legal action had affected premiums?
Depending on the response – any combination of no to the first one and yes to the second and third – I would be asking the OC to agree not to support any insurance claim for the court costs and to support any claim by the insurance company against the individual concerned.
Just because the Owners Corp agrees not to take action doesn’t mean the insurers won’t, so this agreement merely ties the Owners Corp to defend the indefensible and accept the consequences.
However, all that is very airy-fairy and there is one action I would take as a matter of priority – and it’s a motion that could easily be added to the agenda of the EGM – to declare the EC seat of the slapping member vacant (in other words, sack them).
Any kind of violence is completely unacceptable in a strata plan and if the EC member has admitted they slapped another resident, that is all the reason anyone needs for sacking them from the EC. This is a no-brainer, actually and if the slapper admitted in court that they did this, they should have been asked to resign from the EC as soon as they did.
Getting back to the proposed motion, in any sensible and aware Owners Corp, the motion to endorse the alleged fraud would be bounced. So what you really need to do is to make the other owners aware of what is going on and what their liabilities might be both collectively and individually.
I would check the terms of the Strata Insurance very carefully for exclusions (and I’m pretty sure physical assaults would be one of them, if only by implication) and then send out a message to all the other owners explaining what their personal liabilities might be if they are found to have endorsed the perpetration of a fraud.
It’s one of the ironies of strata living that majority of owners think “the strata” is some amorphous organisation that doesn’t really have any connection with them. In fact we are all part of our Owners Corporation and our responsibilities for Owners Corp decisions (or lack of them) are absolute.
I can’t tell how far that would go if owners endorsed a genuine fraud – and I’m guessing neither can most owners. But I’m pretty sure that if you put enough owners in enough doubt about what their liabilities might be if they buy into this alleged fraud, they might (and should) be worried enough to kill this motion stone dead.
Meanwhile, I’m passing this on to our legal and insurance contacts to ask what they think.