Ministry of Investment and Development is working on another amendment of the Act of 15 December 2000 on housing cooperatives (codification: Journal of Laws of 2001, item 27, with changes). The work is aimed at correcting the errors caused by the previous amendment in force since September 2017
The purpose of last year's amendment was to align the provisions of the Act with the Constitutional Court's rulings, which pointed to the unconstitutionality of some of its provisions.
Changes from one year ago, among other things, deprived cooperatives of the possibility of adopting a resolution on the expiry of a cooperative tenant's right to the premises due to late fees, gross overturning against the existing household order or inappropriate behaviour.
At present, in the situations set out above, a cooperative may only request a court to give a ruling in this regard.
Furthermore, thanks to the amendment, a person who was entitled to a cooperative housing right and whose right expired due to the failure to pay fees, is entitled to a claim to re-establish a cooperative housing right (if the cooperative pays off all the debts resulting from the failure to pay these fees together with interest).
What is most important, however, after the amendment, membership of the cooperative is created by law and is only entitled to persons associated with the cooperative. Membership by law entails the absence of an obligation to submit a Member State declaration and an alert. Under the new burden of the Act (Article 3) a member of the cooperative is a person:
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- which has a cooperative right to housing;
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- which has a cooperative property right to the premises;
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- entitled to a claim for the establishment of a cooperative housing right;
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- which is entitled to a claim for the establishment of a separate ownership of the premises, hereinafter referred to as ‘proprietary property’; or
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- being the founder of the cooperative.
Thus, by law, membership of cooperatives loses all who are not entitled to a cooperative tenant's right of establishment, a cooperative property right, a right of separate ownership or a claim to establish a separate property property or a claim to establish a cooperative tenant's right of establishment.
This change has a very negative effect on so-called "popegeer cooperatives". These cooperatives were established to manage the infrastructure of bankrupt state farms.
Housing was sold to former farm workers, while technical infrastructure facilities accompanying residential buildings were transferred free of charge to municipalities or cooperatives created by local purchasers. After the amendment, these cooperatives automatically lost their members.
The members of the cooperative are owners of housing which do not constitute a "stock" of these cooperatives. Due to the decline in the number of members, Popeger cooperatives are threatened with liquidation.
A similar problem concerns cooperatives appointed exclusively to build single-family homes. They will also have to be eliminated as a result of the exclusion of existing members.
second An important mistake of last year's amendment is to omit as members of persons having a claim to establish a cooperative property right to the premises. It is members of cooperatives who in the past have obtained the allocation of a cooperative property right to a premises in a building located on the grounds of which the cooperative does not have a right of ownership or a right of perpetual use. Such persons have only a claim (the so-called ekspective) of a cooperative property right to the premises.
In response to a letter addressed by the Ombudsman, the Ministry replied that it was conducting work to analyse the scope of the amendments to the Act. From the ministry's reply, it can be concluded that there will be another amendment to the cooperative law in the near future.