Some majority sellers of Horizon Towers who have been trying to find volunteers to form a new sales committee

Some majority sellers of Horizon Towers who have been trying to find volunteers to form a new sales committee are understood to have found five - just enough to meet the quorum needed.

With a handful of willing candidates, they are trying to arrange for a meeting to be held on Sunday to discuss the election of a new committee, a source said.

The remaining three members of the previous sales committee of nine quit in a meeting last Friday. The others quit in the days leading up to the meeting as pressure mounted, along with threats of legal suits. If the majority sellers succeed in getting a new committee together, it will be the third for the Horizon Towers sale.

At the meeting on Friday, the majority sellers were supposed to decide on how to respond to a lawsuit brought by Hotel Property Ltd (HPL) and its partners after the en bloc sale of their Leonie Hill property fell through last month.

The Strata Titles Board (STB) refused to grant a collective sale order, saying that Horizon Towers had filed a defective application.

HPL and its partners are suing the majority sellers for failing to file properly.

However, sellers that BT spoke to said that the meeting was more focused on the issue of finding enough volunteers to form a sales committee, rather than deciding on the next course of action.

A lawyer that BT spoke to said that under the current Land Titles (Strata) Act, which governs en bloc sales, there is no mention of needing a sales committee for a collective sale to go through.

He said that having a sales committee is more of a practical issue, as it would be impossible to manage such a big en bloc sale without one.

However, under proposed new rules, an en bloc sales committee must be set up and its members elected at an extraordinary general meeting convened by the estate’s management corporation.

This will apply to all projects which have yet to obtain the required majority consent from owners at the time the amendments are passed by Parliament, most likely this quarter.

HPL and its partners have given the majority sellers up to today to extend the en bloc sale completion deadline to Dec 11 and ‘do everything necessary to obtain the collective sales order’.

Should they lose their case, each of the 255 owners of 173 units who signed off on the en bloc sale may be liable for about $4 million.

Source : Business Times - 11 Sept 2007