‘Red Cross’ Property Seized

The Adjaran Government is auctioning off property belonging to the Red Cross’ Adjara Office. The auction has been temporarily delayed after an appeal by the organization’s leadership to the Batumi Court. 

In Batumi the property of the ‘Red Cross’ Adjara office is non-residential accommodation in numbers 4 and 10 Abashidze Street, which the organization had leased out.
     
“This property was neither under temporary ownership nor any other type of lease. The buildings were bought by our office both from private owners and the City Government at the time; accordingly, they have been under the ownership of the ‘Red Cross Organization’ since the 1930s, when it was founded in Batumi. There is a lot of documentation to prove this. Unfortunately it was impossible to register the property. They also attempted to register it under a strange name. However we survived. After the revolution the Technical Equipment Service issued a passport for the property to us,” said Otar Davitadze, head of the Red Cross Adjara Office.

At the next stage, the ‘Red Cross’ met with problems during the registration of its property at the Public Registration Office. Their documents turned out to be incomplete. “We started preparing to produce new documents, withdrawing them from the archive. Meanwhile the Registration Office registered our property to the City Hall.  The City Hall inserted it on the list of privatized buildings. We were not informed about this situation at all. We learned about it several days before the auction and appealed to the court to stop the case,” - says Davitadze.

They explain having not registered the ‘Red Cross’ property as follows: “The documentation produced by them cannot meet the demands of the present legislation. Moreover according to a 1st September 2004 Batumi City Hall direction and 6th October 2005 Adjara Ministry of Finance and Economics’ statement, the offices at the aforementioned addresses are registered as state property,” said Ketevan Jincharadze, head of the Public Registration Office. According to her, this case is to be discussed by the court and will be solved at the hearing: “If the court orders us to register the property to the ‘Red Cross’ we will do it”.

The Red Cross Adjara Organization is suing the Public Registration Office now. The lawyers of the organization say it had no right to refuse the organization to register its property. The ‘Red Cross’ has the contracts proving the purchase of the estate. However the Adjara Government registered it in 2006 of its own accord. The registration could be carried out if the document showing proof of ownership of the buildings could be provided. Under the same circumstances in 2004 however a passport was issued to the ‘Red Cross’ for the property at the Technical Bureau.

“It is clear that the state has registered this property under its own name and is holding the auction as soon as possible, to find a new owner for the property and to turn the argument into unreasonable one,” says lawyer Teona Chumburidze.

“The Public Registration Office has committed two crimes - it did not register the estate for the ‘Red Cross’ and secondly, it then registered it to the state. We sued to overturn the orders made by the Adjaran Government and the Ministry of Finance and Economics,” added lawyer, Rusudan Baskuradze.

The Red Cross’ total property is 2527 sq. meters of non-residential accommodation. The court hearing is earmarked for the near future.

Maka Malakmadze, Batumi