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This may be in the wrong topic but hopefully it can be transferred to a more appropriate place if required.
In short, I read and hear in various places an Owners Corporation is similar to a company and the Executive Committee has to act like the company’s board.
They supposedly have ‘fiduciary’ duties and need to act with ‘probity’ and not in their own interests, as individuals, but in the interests of the strata as a whole.
What course of action can be taken when they don’t?
I can’t see that anything can be done unless a part of the Strata Titles Act NSW, in our case, is breached. Even then, if the whole EC agrees to do something (hypothetical) like pave an area of Common Property for a barbecue area not everyone wants but they do, they just go and do it.
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A crime is a crime, whether it is white collar or not. Gaining financial advantage by deception would be a crime. Paving an area for a barbecue that nobody else wants is just bad politics – if enough people don’t want it badly enough then they get rid of the committee and remove the offending structure.
The scenario you describe – and other issues like it – are examples of what happens when too few people get involved in the running of a strata scheme.
What you can do in the meantime is to toughen up the procedures in your scheme by making sure the EC meets regularly, minutes its decisions, is answerable to the AGM and cracks down on people who thisnk they can do as they please on common property.
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The EC doesn’t have the power to approve paving the common property for a barbecue area. That is a matter for the owners to decide at a general meeting, and would require a special resolution of the owners.
So yes there is something that you can do – tell them that they can’t proceed with changing the common property unless it has the required approval of the owners at a general meeting. And if they do proceed you will be lodging an application for an order to stop them.
Refer here.
https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/nsw/consol_act/ssma1996242/s65a.html
@Merrick N Sniper said:
But these things happen here all the time and are seldom linked to a by-law or the Act. Just bad governance such as non-descriptive agendas and minutes, things done on a nod-and-a-wink with no vote or paperwork. I reckon it must be similar in heaps of other stratas.Indeed they do … and read this yarn to see how bad things can get when everyone turns a blind eye to the nods and winks – and then won’t let anyone fix it.
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