An expropriated person is always entitled to “reemployment compensation”, unless his property was clearly intended for sale, recalled the Court of Cassation.
No other circumstance allows an expropriating authority to consider eliminating this re-employment compensation, provided for by law and which usually represents a percentage of the value of the property.
The re-employment compensation is intended to compensate for the costs incurred in finding and acquiring another property, equivalent in nature and value to that which the expropriator is forced to cede. Therefore, one community considered, this compensation is not due when the expropriator does not intend to repurchase anything.
Compensation which covers the entirety of the direct damage
However, the courts rejected this point of view. The reuse compensation is due without the expropriator having to justify the necessity of the reuse and it must allow the acquisition of goods of the same nature, at a price equal to the amount of the main compensation, which assumes that it is fixed in proportion to the main compensation awarded, reminded the Court of Cassation in a ruling of November 9.
The absence of resettlement elsewhere, possibly decided by the expropriator, therefore does not concern the expropriator who should therefore not benefit from it. The judges also based this decision on the obligation to provide compensation which covers the entirety of the direct damage caused by the expropriation.
The law only deprives the expropriator of this compensation if he has put his property up for sale in the six months preceding the declaration of public utility on which his forced dispossession is based.
Reproduction forbidden.