Judge orders Strata Titles Board to reconsider Horizon Towers sale
IT WAS — at least on paper — the judgment that many in the public gallery were looking for.
But yesterday, when Justice Choo Han Teck overruled the Strata Titles Board's decision to abort the Horizon Towers sale on technical irregularities, the response from the crowd, mostly the condo's majority owners, was muted.
It was a marked contrast to the scenes of jubilation when the board threw out the $500-million deal in a tribunal hearing in August.
The sale was thrown out as the sale order application was short of three pages, which were supposed to contain the signatures of three of the majority owners. The majority owners appealed against the board's decision.
Delivering his verdict, Justice Choo allowed the appeal and sent the case back to the board to "continue where it left off".
The High Court judge ruled that the missing pages — which were cited by the board as "an incurable defect" even though they were subsequently submitted — were immaterial to the sale order application and that the board had the power to amend it.
Justice Choo said: "If one takes the view that the board has no power to allow an amendment even for a typographical error, then an entire en bloc sale could be stopped by a comma in the wrong place.
"It was the kind of error or omission that could be corrected in a moment."
The board, he said, was "wrong in law" to reason that its "very existence was called into question" by a defective application.
"Once duly constituted, the board has a duty to hear the application and rule on its merits."
Justice Choo, however, declined to make an order to allow the prospective buyer Horizon Partners Pte Ltd (HPPL) — which had successfully applied to intervene in the appeal — to be heard in the board tribunal hearing, in spite of persistent requests by its lawyer, Senior Counsel K Shanmugam.
A "very satisfied" Mr Shanmugam told reporters later that the verdict was "exactly what we had asked for".
When asked what bearing the verdict would have on HPPL's $1-billion lawsuit against the majority owners for loss of profits, which the consortium had agreed to put on hold, he said: "If the appeal was dismissed, we would have to consider the option. HPPL hopes an order would be made for the sale eventually because then the action would be discontinued altogether."
The saga began in April after some majority owners, apparently unhappy that neighbouring properties were fetching higher prices, tried to pull out of the deal with HPPL.
While "satisfied" with the verdict, unit owner Lim Seng Hoo, who chairs the incumbent sale committee, said: "The buyer can threaten to sue on the basis that market value has gone up twice, so they would lose a lot of money if they don't get the sale. But the poor owners cannot rely on such an argument to say this is the reason they don't want to sell."
But Mr Lim promised that the majority owners would "fully honour" the board's eventual decision.
"Unfazed" by the judgment, lawyer Philip Fong — who, together with Senior Counsel K S Rajah, represents four minority owners — did not rule out appealing against it.
Mr Fong, however, said: "We have always fought the case on the basis that the sale was in bad faith. The fact that the board had found the technical objections to be valid does not detract from our original objections."
All the majority owners managed to achieve, said Mr Fong, was to "go back to square one".
Indeed, the tussle seemed far from over. Said Dr Phang Ser Kiat, another lawyer for the minority owners: "We haven't exhausted our grounds of objections yet. In fact, we were barely into the first ground."
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