Tuesday, 23 June 2009

See you in Court Pt 1

Here's the background: Our previous landlord wouldn't drop the rent at the end of our 12 month lease, we tried to negotiate, he wouldn't budge and so we moved out. The place is still empty while weve moved to a nice place in the same area and paying AED70,000 a year less.

We've just received a phone call from the Dubai Municipality telling us that the landlord's agent (Rocky Real Estate) is taking us to Court - tomorrow. They want us to pay two months rent for not giving notice. We did give notice, two months prior to expiry we wrote to Rocky saying "We want to renew but not at the current rent", they wouldn't drop the rent so we moved out . Rocky is the same rental agency that sent repairman 18 times to fix the air-con in the house.

There's been no warning other than this morning's phone call so there's no time for us to prepare (of course) and all Court proceedings in Dubai are in Arabic so we have to find an Arabic lawyer to appear in Court tomorrow.

This is how its done here, the consumer has no rights.

2 comments:

  1. Your kidding - no Court listings, no notification to the other party(you),and service of documents is less than 24 hours if the documents arrive at all. As a result you could be unrepresented tomorrow and royally screwed as a result.

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  2. Drop everything to make sure you find an Arabic-speaking lawyer to represent you! Make sure he has a copy of your notice letter and that he translates it into Arabic.

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