It is not unknown for owners corps and building managers who have cars abandoned on common property to roll them out on to the street where they have to be dealt with by the local council and/or police. Often they will remove the plates to hasten the car being deemed ‘abandoned”.
This is, of course, completely illegal but it gets round one of the great anomalies of strata law that Common Property parking is private property as far as the council and police are concerned but it’s not private property if you want to remove vehicles that aren’t supposed to be there.
It’s hard to know what the details of this particular case are but it would seem that the car was on common property and hadn’t been moved for a while. Notices to move it weren’t getting to the car’s owner – or they were being ignored. And throw into the mix a typically high-handed attitude towards tenants who are treated as second-class citizens in many strata buildings.
If the Strata Manager is in possession of the wedding dress, it suggests the car was opened by someone (as part of the process of rolling or towing it out?).
I doubt if the local council parking attendants would have removed the plates, as has been alleged.
I would put my money on this being a case of a car parked illegally, a car owner who either didn’t know or care that they were in breach and a frustrated and/or overzealous building manager or EC taking the law into their own hands.
You won’t get any joy with the CTTT as they won’t award damages. I doubt very much if the police will be interested in a case of theft or criminal damage. So your best bet may be to talk to a lawyer about a claim for financial restitution at a district court against the Owners Corporation on the basis that they or their agents must have organised the removal of the car which they were not entitled to do.
Other questions that spring to mind include why the daughter wasn’t parked inside the building, how often she used the car, whether or not the Owners Corp knew whose car it was, whether or not it was parked on common property and whether or not she ever got a notice to remove it, either directly or on the car.