Three more months to claim nationalised houses

Government will extend the deadline to submit notifications regarding claims on buildings abusively taken over by the State, according to Law 10/2001, from August 14 to November 14.

The extension of the deadline does not require Parliament’s intervention, even though the modification is made to a law regulating property regime, say senators in the Senate’s Juridical Committee.

The suggestion to summon Parliament for an extraordinary session in order to endorse the extension of the deadline for submitting claims came from general mayor Traian Basescu, but is dismissed by the MPs.

Although the Government was not empowered by Parliament to issue emergency ordinances for normative acts concerning the property regime, the Cabinet, under the circumstances, may use such a procedure, because “this is not a matter of substance, so there is no point in summoning Parliament for an extraordinary session,” PSD (Social-Democrat Party) senator Ion Predescu, member of the Juridical Committee and one of those that took part in drafting Law 10/2001, told Ziarul Financiar.

Predescu says the six-month deadline since the publication of the law, allowed for the former owners to claim their buildings “was too short”, but Parliament set it “in order to speed things up.” “The papers to substantiate the claims are very difficult to obtain as they are stored in various archives.

Not to mention that many of the employees of such institutions are on holiday, which is all the more reason for delay,” Predescu says.

PNL (National Liberal Party) does not agree with extending the deadline, as it would have liked “the house retrocession issue dealt with once and for all,” Senator Nicolae Vlad Popa, member of the Juridical Committee, told Ziarul Financiar.

Furthermore, this extension entails postponing the one-year deadline during which the Cabinet was supposed to complete the draft law on reimbursing those who did not get their property back in accordance with Law 10.