The Syndicate of Owners of Real Estate and Leased Buildings considered that “the tenants’ committee statement constitutes a continuation of the policy of inverting facts and falsifying events, and a blatant attempt to portray the tenant as the sole victim, while the legally and factually established truth is that the owners are the sole and only victim in this file, for more than forty years.”
In a statement, the syndicate added, “Tenants have resided in thousands of apartments and invested in thousands of commercial stores at almost free or completely free rents for more than four decades, while owners have been deprived of their natural right to benefit from their properties, and have been prevented from adjusting rents or recovering their properties, until these properties became a burden on them instead of being a source of decent living. While the tenant enjoyed stable and protected housing, the owner lived in severe economic distress due to unfair exceptional laws. As for the new law, which is portrayed today only by them as a “harsh” law, it is in fact a very lenient law and entirely in their interest, as it extended the tenant an additional period of up to 12 full years, in addition to more than 40 years of free or almost free residence, and established a special support fund for tenants at the expense of the owners, without establishing any fund to compensate the owners for the enormous losses they incurred over decades of disguised confiscation of their rights.”
The syndicate asked, “What legislative justice is this that keeps the owner hostage in his property, asks him to remain silent, and asks him to sacrifice again in the name of “social justice,” while the state evades its duty to bear financial responsibility for its policies in oppressing owners?”
The syndicate continued, “Portraying the tenant as an absolutely weaker party is a deliberate misrepresentation of public opinion, because the real weaker party is the owner whose rights have been confiscated by force of law, who has been deprived of the fruits of his labor and property, and who has been driven into bankruptcy, while the tenant enjoyed long-term residential stability at a symbolic cost that has no relation to any standard of justice, market, or economic logic, or invests in its commercial sections and reaps profits.”
The syndicate stressed that “any attempt to reopen the issue of the rent law from a populist, emotional, or social blackmail standpoint is completely rejected, because this law is the minimum correction of a historical injustice that still exists today. The syndicate also refuses to hold the media or the legislative authority responsible for excluding the voice of the tenants, while the truth is that the owner’s voice has been silenced for decades, and it is time for it to be heard.”
The owners’ syndicate concluded its statement by emphasizing that “the era of confiscating private property is over, and the era of trading in people’s suffering at the expense of one group is also over. The owner is not a social adversary, but rather a right holder, and the syndicate will no longer accept any legislation that reproduces injustice, or extends the disguised seizure of Lebanese properties under any title or pretext.”
