TT(O)M

This article discusses the unfair rent laws. To familiarize yourself with the topic and understand how a group of citizens is being unfairly targeted by the Government of Malta, head over to https://www.alanbonnici.com/2021/06/maltas-unjust-rent-laws.html . Source DOI On the 5th of June, Social Housing Minister Roderick Galdes proudly reported that since 2017 the number of people on the waiting list has gone down by 42%. That is a great achievement.  Over a 5-year period, almost 1,400 persons are no longer on the Social Housing waiting list. What an achievement! One must compliment the Government's efforts that saw 160 families taking up social loans in order to purchase properties. This was done through the Home Assist scheme. Why is the effort to help persons become homeowners not applied equally to those in pre-1995 rental properties? Another initiative to bring down this number, according to minister Galdes, was to implement measures to reduce the number of families that would ...

The Government of the Republic of Malta, a member state of the European Union, is unfairly targeting a small group of citizens by forcing them to rent out their properties at below market rates.  Below is the opinion of the European Court in the Case of Buttigieg and Others v. Malta; Application No 22456/15 (http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-188275): “ The Court has previously held that in a situation where the applicants’ predecessor in title had, decades before, knowingly entered into a rent agreement with relevant restrictions (specifically the inability to increase rent or to terminate the lease), the applicants’ predecessor in title could not, at the time, reasonably have had a clear idea of the extent of inflation in property prices in the decades to follow.“ It also affirms that: “Furthermore, those applicants, who had inherited a property that had already been subject to a lease, had not had the possibility to set the rent themselves (or to freely terminate the agre...