the judge cuts the rent by 300 thousand euros
VENICE – The Court reduces the rent by a Venetian hotel after the property had asked for the termination of the contract because in the worst months it had not fixed the contractually agreed amount. This for a very trivial reason: the place was closed, like all the others, due to the restrictions imposed by the lockdown and subsequent measures. There have been other judgments of this type, but the novelty is that in this case a certain inconvenience was recognized to the hotelier from April 2020 to May 2022 despite the state of emergency being declared closed on March 31st. The fact of having recognized represents a certain uncertainty even beyond the first case in which a judge modulates a rent.
CLOSED HOTEL
The case concerns a hotel with about fifteen rooms in the center of Venice, which from April 2020 to April 2021 paid about 270 thousand euros in total rent instead of 350 thousand, bringing in defense the famous Dpcm of the Conte government in which everything was closed and everything was closed. it also prohibited mobility within cities, except in exceptional cases.
The judge Giuseppina Zito had ordered a 2021 fine for the continuation of the lease rite with the aim of ascertaining the seriousness of the alleged breach of contract.
It is documentally proven and undisputed that the conductor-opposing party paid the total amount of 461,565 euros instead of 761,280 euros from April 2020 until June 2022 on the basis of the contractual provisions, while from July 2022 it resumed paying the monthly amount at full rent of 32,940 euros.
PARTIAL IMPOSSIBILITY
For the judge, the pandemic had made it impossible for the landlord to provide his service (payment) due to a partial impossibility of using the property. Although it remained available to the hotelier, its use for commercial purposes was temporarily very limited and when the use returned to total, the contract was able to be fully respected.
Considering that the canons of contractual solidarity and good faith prescribe saving the interests of others but not to the point of suffering an appreciable sacrifice or economic personal of the landlord – the judge – the hotel request is considered acceptable, not by zeroing but continuing by reducing the rent in the amount equal to the total amount already paid up to June 2022, equal to 461,565, compared to the contractually established amount of 761,280.
The lawyer follows the hotel Jacopo Molina, which had dealt with cases of non-compliance caused by covid during the pandemic. In some cases it had been the sharp reduction in turnover, in this, the impossibility of using the property as a hotel.
“The judge – commented Molina – acknowledged the request for redetermination also because the recovery was gradual and especially for Venice, in consideration of its international vocation”.