When a spouse takes over the management of the apartment in co-ownership, he is generally supposed to have received a tacit mandate from the other. The other spouse cannot therefore maintain that all the decisions taken at the general meetings which he did not attend would be null, ruled the Court of Cassation.
A co-ownership trustee had taken legal action to obtain that a couple of co-owners be ordered to pay late charges. But this couple, whose husband was the usual interlocutor, who always presented himself as the representative of the matrimonial joint ownership and thus voted in his name at general assemblies, raised a difficulty.
The wife, in contesting the debts, claimed that she had not given her husband a mandate to act in her name, that votes on serious questions involving an absolute or qualified majority could not be valid without an express proxy. on her part and that, moreover, she had not been validly summoned by letters addressed to joint ownership without further details. These arguments were rejected since the husband had taken over, in full view of all, the management of this undivided lot.
However, the judges indicated, this is not an intangible principle and possible clues such as the absence of community of life or the appearance of any discordance between the lice could suggest that the community of interests created by the marriage is not certain. It could then be, in this case, that the personal convocation of both is necessary to be valid and that the votes of one, without a written mandate from the other, do not bind the person who is absent at the meetings.
(Cass. CIv 3, 1.6.2022, J 21-16.514).
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