Lawyer Maria del Pilar Zuleta warns people who rent property to do due diligence on the person who is renting and what the person is doing inside the property during the duration of the contract.
The lawyer writes in a feature article in Noticias SIN that since the Domain Forfeiture Law 340-22 approval, property owners are subject to having their property forfeited by the state if their tenants commit an unlawful act covered by the new law. The law is awaiting its ruling to go into effect.
The lawyer says that the property owner would have to wait out the entire course of the criminal case in court for a chance to recover the property seized by the state.
Art.51.5 and 6 of the Constitution establishes that property may be subject to confiscation by final criminal sentence for having been used for illicit drug trafficking or may be confiscated within the framework of a domain extinction trial (Art. 5.1 and 11.8 Law 340-22).
The bad news, the lawyer alerts in Noticias SIN feature, is that in the future, either with the final criminal sentence of confiscation or with the forfeiture of ownership, in these cases, the property right of the property will be lost for only one reason: because it was used or destined for an illegal act, regardless of the owner’s alienation to its occurrence.
She writes that the situation could get even worse for the property owner when considering that the evidence standard for criminal confiscation is minuscule under the new law of extinction of domain.
She concludes in the feature: “So, dear owner, keep in mind that you should not limit yourself to ascertain you are getting the real rental value, but you must also do your due diligence to know everything you can about the tenant and what your tenant is doing inside the property even if you are neither a prosecutor nor a private investigator.”
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Noticias SIN
9 August 2023