The deadline for filing claims with the bankruptcy trustee against the company “Ekvator”, which went bankrupt last month, has expired. Among the creditors, the largest number are the defrauded buyers of apartments in the Banja Luka neighborhood of Novi Borik, from whom the investor “Ekvator” took 11 million BAM in 2018. The deadline for completing the works expired at the end of 2019, and the building is still unfinished.
Gojko Mijatović is just one of 150 defrauded buyers of apartments in Banja Luka. Six years later, the building has not been completed, and the investor company “Ekvator” has gone bankrupt. The buyers were left without money and without apartments. In the meantime, several buyers have died, not having lived to move into the purchased apartments.
“We took apartments in the phantom settlement, gave our life’s work, took out loans, gave our life savings to Đorđe Davidović. I gave 72,000 for a 40-square-meter apartment where my mother, now deceased, gave money for the apartment,” says Gojko Mijatović, president of the Association of Deceived Citizens of Novi Borik.
The building is half-finished. Only bare walls, without the necessary connections and a pile of rubble. Some buyers are trying to finish the apartments themselves.
However, another 4 million marks are needed to complete the building, which they do not have. They are hoping for help from the city administration and republican institutions. When they realized that they had definitely been deceived, they filed criminal charges against the investors.
“After 2.5 years, the investigation at the District Public Prosecutor’s Office is nowhere near the end. The competent prosecutor, Bojan Topić, has not even deigned to contact us once,” says Mijatović.
Another building is planned on that site. In 2018, the investor took 1.5 million from 20 buyers for apartments whose construction had not even begun.
Will the buyers who felt the bitter taste of fraud be compensated in the bankruptcy proceedings, we asked the bankruptcy administrator, who has received hundreds of reports from creditors of the company “Ekvator”.
“We will have specific information on January 23, when the examination and reporting hearing is scheduled. The examination will discuss the reported claims, and the reporting hearing will determine the direction of the bankruptcy proceedings themselves, whether towards sale or settlement or some other direction,” says bankruptcy administrator Saša Zubović.
Lawyer Arsenija Baltić believes that it is completely uncertain how the court will evaluate the defrauded buyers who are not registered as owners, because the building does not have the necessary permits.
“What apartment buyers could hope for is that they would be granted an exclusive right for the apartments they paid for and took possession of, i.e. that these apartments would be separated from the bankruptcy estate and not be subject to settlement by other creditors of ‘Ekvator’, but that is questionable, because none of them are registered as the owners of these apartments,” Baltić points out.
In our legal system, buyers of apartments under construction are unprotected.
“The system does not protect. There is no way to protect them when they pay the amount and when they do not pay, they are in a disadvantageous position. The only way is to ask for a bank guarantee from the investor for the completion of the works, that is the only security, but that is still not the practice in our country,” emphasizes the owner of the real estate agency Stefan Vasilić.
We were unable to find out what the owner of “Ekvator”, Đorđe Davidović, has to say about all this, because he did not answer our calls.
Photo: Illustration
