Most cadastral municipalities in Medulin and Pula have ‘gaps’ in the order of land registry entries. These ‘gaps’ are used for ‘manipulations’ with ownership registrations.
written by Ivica Grčar
[email protected]
Regarding the ‘manipulations’ with land registries and building permits, several readers contact me regularly every month. This frequent correspondence from readers to this column with stories related to ‘manipulations’ with land registries and building permits is partly due to the fact that these topics are neglected in other media and columns. This time, we will discuss two cases, one from Medulin and the other from Split. The reader who cites an example from Medulin describes the case well, and its publication can also be understood as a public call to the competent state attorney to initiate an official procedure and verify the validity of the reader’s claims.
Typographical Errors for Malversations The reader writes that from 2001 to 2004, during the alignment of spatial plans, the most malversations occurred in the relationship between the cadastre – land court – bank (most often HYPO). The simplest and at the same time least noticeable way was ‘skillfully’ manipulating the inversion of numbers when submitting proposals for the transfer of ownership, most often when the proposer is a bank.
Here’s how it was done: a bank client takes out a loan, completes the solemnization, and in one of the documents, a ‘mistake’ appears in the number of the land registry entry (for example, instead of 3,245, the transfer was made to registry 3,425). This frees up 180 spots in the land registry, and the person who took out the loan is unaware that they have ‘served’ as an intermediary for the ‘drainage’ of land previously illegally and intentionally transferred to the land registry entry intended in advance for the ‘maneuver’ with the inversion of the number.
Illegal (Additional) Construction
Investor supposedly unknown, so no demolition
A reader from Split writes: illegal builders have destroyed my apartment, and I am powerless. I am the owner of an apartment in Split, Palmotićeva 11, in a building where illegal additional construction has been carried out. On the old two-story house from 1928, two more floors were built without any papers or permits. The house is located in the protected historical core of Split, and the additional construction has not been accepted by the spatial planning documentation. The investors of the additional construction are so arrogant that they openly say that no one can do anything to them, that they know how this state functions, and that they are protected by someone important. And nothing has helped my appeals to various institutions. The investors managed to annul two demolition orders for the additional construction with false claims that they are not investors and do not live in those apartments. And the spokesperson for the Minister of Construction told me that I am not a party in the procedure, even though I have all the evidence of who the investors are. Given that I do not believe that everyone in the Ministry of Construction is blind and incompetent, as they have not been able to determine who lives in those illegally constructed apartments for nine years, it is obviously a matter of corruption, not ignorance, claims the reader from Split.
It is enough for such a document to pass in the Land Court, and it does pass because in Medulin, as a rule, all cadastral municipalities have ‘gaps’ in the order of land registry entries. These ‘gaps’ serve precisely for the described and similar ‘manipulations’. Sometimes in one cadastral municipality from Medulin, parcels with new measurement markings become current in the land registry entries of the old measurement in the cadastral municipality of Pula. Such land is recorded as private (with rigged solutions), while in fact, it is social, or the property of the Republic of Croatia. This particularly happened in the industrial zone in Pula (Pevec, Kaufland, Mercator, Pula bypass, etc.).
Manipulations with ‘P’ Another method is current at the Municipal Court in Pula, which are lawyer ‘manipulations’ with ‘P’ (litigation cases). Based on requests for insight into case files in the litigation registry, lawyers take several cases and swap the file covers to subsequently adjust the litigation cases in which illegal registrations were made – the outflow of real estate.
Thus, parties who request insight into the file after about ten years of litigation (with the presentation of a payment slip on which is the number P – with again the wrong number (inversion of the numbers of their ‘real’ file) receive a response that they cannot access the file of the requested case because it is not their case. All such ‘manipulations’ that readers write to us about and describe in detail are not difficult to verify if there is a real desire to do so. But, it needs to be desired, for example, by the competent state attorney for Pula and Medulin.
We invite entrepreneurs to present their problems. Following your writings, by pointing out absurdities in individual cases, we will highlight the shortcomings of the system as a whole and thus support the readers of Lider as individuals in their unequal disputes with the cumbersome state administration. Contact:
e-mail: [email protected]
tel. 01/6333-524
address: Ivica Grčar, Lider,
Savska 41, 10144 Zagreb
