Landlords taking extreme steps to evict tenants amidst pandemic
Chief Executive Joel Abraham says it has been discovered that some landlords are disconnecting water and electricity supply on their rental properties in an effort to get rid of tenants.
This leaves the tenants in a precarious situation of having to endure hostility or leave their homes in the midst of a public health crisis.
While some landlords have been accommodating, others are taking extreme steps to evict their tenants.
“The FCCC has in fact taken a few matters to court. We’ve got interim orders done by the court to ask EFL to switch back the power to ensure these people are not staying in the dark and there’s no other creative practices. We’ve had instances of lockouts where the tenant goes out to pick their children and by the time they come back from the nanny’s or come back from some where they find that there’s a new padlock on the house.”
Abraham says in some cases the landlords are using creative tactics against their tenants.
“Naturally in Fiji there’s a lot of instances when you move into a flat the utilities being electricity and water don’t get transferred under the tenants’ name. The landlord retains the name on the bill. So the account is predominately the landlord’s account. Now in the case of dispute we find that landlords feel that they can’t leave it and they’ll go and ask EFL to disconnect.”
He says the first step for the FCCC is to mediate, and if a party is caught trying to beat the system, appropriate action is taken.
“They’ll try and go outside the boundaries of the law and we take exception to that. And in those instances we have taken to court. We ensure our lawyers make correct representation. If there’re interim orders that needs to be taken we take interim orders so that everything is done overboard.”
The FCCC as an enforcement body says they’re not part of the judiciary, but in order to enforce certain laws, they will make applications to the courts.
Credit: FBC
Date: 7/7/2020
