DOHA: A racket has come to light whereby some tenants deliberately pick a fight with their landlords and lodge a complaint with a rent dispute resolution committee to avoid paying rent for months — during which time they change their residence and repeat the fraud.
In this way, unscrupulous tenants manage to live in rented homes with their families for years and pay rent for only three to four months in a year, sources in the Central Municipal Council (CMC) told The Peninsula yesterday.
According to sources, the rent law lacks provisions to stop such fraud. The legal committee of the CMC discussed the issue last Tuesday and its recommendations to ensure that such rackets cease will be debated in the council soon.
After discussion, the CMC is expected to forward the recommendations to the Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning to amend the rent law and make it compulsory for all tenancy contracts to be attested by the government.
Rent agreements are now attested by a municipality (under whose jurisdiction the property is located) only if the property owners agree to it and are willing to pay the attestation fee — which is one percent of the annual rent.
Landlords, according to CMC sources, avoid attestation since they must pay the above fee. A tenant is not legally authorised to get a rent contract attested. Also, for attestation he needs property documents which he doesn’t have access to.
By amending the rent law, the CMC wants to make sure that an attested rent agreement is treated as proof of the rent amount by the court. “This would mean that a tenant or landlord could directly go to a court in the case of a dispute and the matter is resolved immediately,” said a CMC source.
According to him, rent dispute committees take a long time — between three and six months — to resolve a dispute. In this time, an unscrupulous tenant who has filed the complaint to delay paying the rent shifts his residence.
The number of such tenants has been on the rise. Their modus operandi is that they rent a house by paying a month’s rent. Then they cook up a dispute and file a complaint with a rent dispute resolution committee.
Since the rent amount is disputed, the rent is to be deposited with the committee until the dispute is resolved. But unscrupulous tenants avoid depositing the rent and move from the rented home after a few months and shift to another residence, where they repeat the fraud, the CMC source said.
