Greedy housing agents and condo owners cause $590 million deal to go sour

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

Come October, market will slide and they will pay a hefty price

http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/prem...-sale-20130904


Court quashes Thomson View sale
by Grace Leong

[SINGAPORE] A proposed $590 million collective sale of Thomson View Condominium is scuppered after the High Court found that its marketing agent's offer of more than $548,000 in incentive payments to four owners to get a requisite 80 per cent majority amounted to bad faith.

Justice Andrew Ang, in a 30-page decision released yesterday, found that HSR International Realtors "egregiously breached its duty to avoid any possible conflict of interest", and also "breached its duty of transparency" by failing to disclose the incentive payments to the Collective Sales Committee (CSC) and other owners.

As such, the four owners should not be counted in the requisite 80 per cent majority for the sale to go through, he ruled. Discounting these owners, the 80 per cent consent threshold would not be reached; the plaintiffs were therefore not even in a position to apply for court approval of the sale, he said.

Yesterday's ruling came two weeks after the Court of Appeal upheld a decision by Justice Belinda Ang to disallow a $33 million en bloc sale of Harbour View Gardens because she found its marketing agent's offer of a $200,000 inducement to a couple to join the sale is "commercially unacceptable", and that its CSC had failed to act in good faith.


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