Story & pix by Victor Seow
RESIDENTS and home owners are advised not to default on their payment of maintenance charges as the Strata Management Act empowers harsher punitive action to be taken against defaulters by the Strata Management Tribunal.
This was the message conveyed by exco member for Town & Country Planning and Housing Jagdeep Singh on Nov 28 when he officiated the Strata Management Workshop organised by Ivory Group.
Commenting on provisions of the Act to the various stakeholders who attended the workshop, Jagdeep said wide ranging powers were vested in the Strata Management Tribunal to hear cases brought up by Joint Management Body (JMB) or Management Committees (MC) against any particular parcel owner.
“If there is any outstanding service charges, the JMB or MC can actually take action against that particular parcel owner and if there is an order issued by the Strata Management Tribunal (SMT) requiring the parcel owner to make a payment, any failure to do so will result in that parcel owner to be slapped with a fine not exceeding RM5,000 or a jail term of not more than three years,” Jagdeep said.
“Hence, the impact on the consumers can be serious as we are all aware. The collection of maintenance fees in any project is never 100%. There would be insufficient space in our jails for this group of defaulters,” he added in jest.
Speaking to reporters later, Jagdeep gave a detailed breakdown on the losses incurred by the state government which is still managing a number of public housing schemes in the state.
“The law now is very strict on defaulters. There is a lot of arrears involved. To put things into perspective, we take the four main ones that I mentioned during my speech on the Urban Regeneration Committee; Taman Tun Sardon, Taman Free School, Mak Mandin and Rifle Range. Between 2010 to 2015, it took the state government nearly RM20 million to maintain and upgrade them. The total arrears from these four public housing projects amounted to RM15 million. So our overall losses was about RM35 million. Not getting our arrears and on top of that, we have to pump in money to maintain them,” he said.