Musat & Asociatii is reporting that it gained an important victory for its client — the Cyane SRL real estate developer — in a dispute between the Cluj Napoca Local Council and the Association for Urbanistic Protection of Cluj involving the latter's attempts to have urban planning documents issued by the former related to the construction of a large real estate project (the Luminia residential complex) canceled.
According to Musat, "the ruling issued by the Oradea Court of Appeal is of high importance, both by the nature and the complexity of the litigation at hand, which brought to discussion significant legal issues for the town-planning and the local community, but also by the resonance in the business environment and among real estate developers, beneficiaries of such authorizations and administrative documents. Over the past years, the latter have formed the object of challenges filed by the Association for Urbanistic Protection of Cluj, the litigations promoted by the Association creating a vast contentious practice before the courts of law. The success is the more eloquent as it is for the first time when national case-law unequivocally argues the possibility of the authorities to provide an external reasoning for the administrative document, and not mandatorily in its contents. The requirement to motivate the administrative document should not be assessed only in relation to the number of reasons in its contents, but also to the capacity of the documents that were at the basis of its issuance."
“The ruling of the court of law establishes a well-deserved standard of normality in the administrative judicial practice, in a time when the challenging of town-planning documentations of many of the real estate projects developed in Romania over the past years has generated an unjustified risk factor and, at the same time, a cost-generating one for the business sector," stated Musat Partner Octavian Popescu, who participated in the project with a team of attorneys from the firm's the Cluj Regional Office that was coordinated by Managing Associate Ioana Varga. "The security of the legal relations should be felt also in the town-planning field, given that the development of the economic and demographic centers automatically determined the extension of the residential and office area. At the same time, the ruling of the court of law is beneficial to the administrative-urbanistic case-law, from the perspective of the impossibility to check the appropriateness of the issuance of the administrative document within the lawfulness inspection performed by the court of law."
