CASE
Back to the future
Nosso Cliente
Large builder and developer of subdivisions and popular residential properties.
Desafio
Our client launched, between 2016 and 2017, a series of popular allotments, in an area declared of social interest, exempt from IPTU. Great sales success. Two years later, with a brutal drop in municipal revenue, the City Hall, under new management, decided to launch retroactive IPTU charges for areas of social interest. Imagine the chaos: families with low purchasing power living in their homes conquered with so much effort begin to receive letters from the City Hall, starting to charge IPTU for the present and, amazingly, for the past – precisely from 2014 to 2018. Period in which, even, there was urban property there, much less electricity or sewage. It is as if the Municipality’s Finance Secretary has gone back in time and brought some late IPTU bills to collect from the current owners.
Rain of complaints in the construction company’s service channels. Residents’ associations being organized. The risk of negative return from an already successful project that paid shareholders was latent.
Nossa Solução
It is unconstitutional to charge retroactive IPTU. Any law student would know that, just as the City Hall did. But what the City also knew was that our client had no active standing to defend himself against IPTU charges, since he was no longer the owner of the properties. Defending the thousands of residents, one by one, was also economically unviable. By law, associations must be at least two years old to be able to represent their members in court, so defending the residents en bloc, through associations, was also not an option.
We built an unprecedented thesis, out of any civil procedure book: the client would ask in court to cancel the IPTU charges on the grounds that he would have indirect legitimacy to litigate against the City Hall. We sensitized the judges on what was happening and how the City was using procedural chess to illegally (and immorally) collect undue amounts from vulnerable people.
Soon we got the first injunctions ordering the immediate cancellation of the charges. After some time, we got the first sentences and recently all cases were closed with the client’s and the residents’ victory. Emblematic and pioneering case on indirect active legitimacy for cases of illegal collection, when the person who suffers the economic impacts of the collection is not the taxpayer. And the best: the economic return of the project was preserved.