At the end of last year, Minister of Development and Technology Waldemar Buda presented planned changes to perpetual usufruct of land. Following the publication of the draft act amending the Real Estate Management Act and certain other acts (number UD257 on the list of legislative and programmatic works of the Council of Ministers), implementing the announced changes, PINK Association submitted its comments to the draft law.
In the letter, we indicated, among other things, that the Project does not provide for the conceptual solution expected by the commercial real estate market, i.e. the transformation of perpetual usufruct rights into ownership rights by operation of law.
Below is a summary of the changes we propose:
- abandoning the civil law nature of the claim for the acquisition of ownership rights to land granted for use and its time limitation by modifying the structure of the claim or introducing a new procedure for the purchase of land granted for perpetual usufruct by its perpetual usufructuaries – perpetual usufructuaries should be granted the right to submit an application for the purchase of land without any time limit;
- in the event of failure to introduce the solution in point 1 above – extension of the period of existence of the claim for land redemption to at least 5 years;
- specifying the deadline for concluding an agreement on the purchase of land granted for perpetual usufruct;
- introducing a closed list of grounds entitling land owners to refuse to conclude a land purchase agreement;
- revising the limitations of the project in question by enabling the perpetual user to acquire undeveloped land, as well as land for which perpetual usufruct was established later than 10 years before the planned solutions come into force;
- changes the method of calculating the benefits due from the user provided for in the project;
- introducing regulations that would precisely define the procedure and conditions for issuing or refusing to grant so-called owner's consent, as well as the deadlines for resolving the matter;
The project is currently at the government work stage.