Minority owners: Sweet victory but ‘no winner’

The epic legal tussle over the $500 million collective sale of Horizon Towers finally ended last Thursday with the Court of Appeal’s decision to dismiss the deal.

This final judgment marks the first time Singapore’s highest court has decided in favour of minority owners in a collective sale dispute.

While the four sets of minority owners who took their battle all the way to the end are jubilant about their victory, not all the other parties are as satisfied.

In the time that it took to wrap up the Horizon Towers saga, the property market has gone through its biggest boom and a record bust.

Owners of the condominium in Leonie Hill are now sitting on units that are losing more of their value every day in this recession.

They have also spent millions of dollars on the court case, which dragged on for 21/2 years.

When everything is said and done, who are the real losers and winners of Singapore’s longest collective sale battle?

Never has a group of minority owners successfully managed to block the collective sale of an estate, until now.

As the landmark decision by the Court of Appeal sinks in, celebration is in the air for those owners of Horizon Towers who never wanted to sell their units to begin with. ‘For us, the price was never an issue,’ said Ms

J. Tan, who had objected to the collective sale from Day One.

It has not been an easy battle.

When one of the minority owners, Mr Hendra Gunawan, tried to find a lawyer to help him and his neighbours block the sale in 2007, three firms turned them down before Harry Elias Partnership agreed to represent them. Although 33 owners out of the 210 in total objected to the sale, only nine filed an official objection with the Strata Titles Board (STB).

Besides Mr Gunawan and his wife, the minority owners who fought on to the end were Mr Rudy Darmawan, Madam Ong Sioe Hong and Mr Ng Eng Ghee.

Mr Gunawan, an Indonesian who has lived in Horizon Towers with his wife and two sons for eight years, runs his family’s business back in Indonesia. Mr Darmawan, another Indonesian, is believed to be an executive at a multinational corporation.

Madam Ong is the managing director of department store Metro and the sister of Metro Holdings boss Jopie Ong. She, her husband and their two sons have lived in Horizon Towers for more than 20 years.

Mr Ng is a retired property developer and is listed as a director in firms such as Hi-Rise Builders and Bideford Realty.

The first victory for the minority owners came in August 2007, when the STB unexpectedly rejected the sale of Horizon Towers on the technical ground that the sale application did not contain all the required documents.

High Court judge Choo Han Teck disagreed with the decision, saying the technical errors were not serious enough to halt the sale. In December 2007, the STB gave the green light for the collective sale.

This only spurred the minority owners to renew their fight and take it to the Court of Appeal.

Last Thursday, after more than two years of legal wrangling and over $1 million in legal fees from their own pockets, the minority owners finally got the decision they had been waiting for - and made history in the process.

But Mr Gunawan said that there is ‘no winner’ in the whole process, which ‘dragged on too long’. ‘We are just protecting our homes,’ he said. ‘It’s so tiring. The money we spent, we don’t know whether we can get it back.’

The court has yet to award costs, but it is likely that the majority owners will have to pay a portion of the minority owners’ legal fees.