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Patch wrote:
I was interested in Section 24 of the Act you mentioned. How can an errant committee member/s be forced to pay for restoration of common property. Can Tribunal rule for that ?
OK, I should preface this by saying it’s not legal advice and for that you really should go to a strata lawyer.
That said, the Tribunal can rule that the expenditure wasn’t properly authorised so, logically, the person who signed the bills was acting independently.
Then it would be up to the Owners (as the owners corp) to seek to have that money paid back. So individual owners, or a group thereof, send a letter to the strata committee asking them to pursue debt recovery against the errant committee members for the strata funds they spent without proper authority.
Obviously, the strata committee probably isn’t going to take itself to court over this, so you then apply to NCAT to compel them to take action (Section 232). At this point, anticipate mass resignations and multiple sales of units as the culprits (and the passively complicit) try to distance themselves from potential liability.
Make sure you have a Strata Committee in Exile – and a good, reliable strata manager – ready to take the reins when it all starts to fall apart.
By the way, two trips to the Tribunal, plus appeals, plus debt recovery, is a long hard row to hoe – but maybe a determination to see this through will put enough of a scare into the committee members to get them to do the right thing – which is to made good their personal land grabs then resign from the committee.