Italian law firm Studio Legale Metta represented a group of 13 international real estate investors to recover more than €1 million from a flawed real estate project. After three years of court actions and extrajudicial negotiations, the legal team was proud to announce a successful outcome for its clients.
“This is definitively a satisfactory result for our firm” said Italian lawyer Nick Metta, leading the real estate team that worked on this case at Studio Legale Metta, “and we are grateful to our clients who trusted our firm through the difficulties faced in this long and complex case”.
It all started in 2007 with a project to refurbish a historic Italian mill, creating 44 apartments in the Tuscan hills. Investors from around the world liked the project and many hired Studio Legale Metta to assist with the individual transactions. In the negotiations, the law firm insured that its clients obtained an insurance bond from the builder to cover the money turned over as a deposit, with the agreement to settle the balance upon completion of the construction work. The project unfortunately was not completed within the expected timeframe and the vendor subsequently went bankrupt. At this point, the Studio Legale Metta team changed tact from negotiating a purchase for its clients to reclaiming the paid deposits totaling over one million euro. In 2012, after three years of legal actions, the insurance company fully satisfied the claim refunding 100% of the deposits plus interests.
“I hope that positive outcomes like this” explained Metta, “will inspire off-plan buyers to insist that builders issue deposit bonds. In spite of the law in force since 2005 which made these bonds mandatory, they have only been issued in 30% of all Italian off-plan transactions over the past five years. This has left approximately 30,000 families with no hope for recovering their deposits in some of the 7,000 bankruptcy cases declared by Italian construction companies during the same period” (source Corriere della Sera – 7 August 2012).