Undiplomatic impunity: Chinese embassy leaves New Zealand landlord with $900 bill
People’s Republic is granted immunity from paying cleaning, rubbish removal and key cutting tab after diplomat vacated Wellington house
Like... that kind of sucks... but I also love to see landlords denied clawing back security deposits for bullshit reasons.
Also, for an embassy building 900 bucks is fucking nothing.
Imagine trying to stir anti-chinese sentiment over $900 that a landlord thinks they're owed. Laughable effort, really.
If anything, I respect that embassador more now.
Chandler said he would not rent property to embassies again.
“No more diplomats, and according to our property manager, that’s the advice he gives to others in the same area as well,” he told Stuff.
This seems like they didn't stick around for the damage walk through or someusch rather than malicious damage.
But apparently that's a risk of the business:
In 2018, landlords were warned not to rent to diplomats after the deputy head of mission for the EU’s delegation in New Zealand, Eva Tvarozkova, was cleared from paying $20,000 to cover unpaid rent and damage to a property she rented in Wellington.
Show me a picture of the property after it was vacated. Sounds like the landlord is being a typical bastard. A landbastard if you will.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A landlord in New Zealand has run up against an unusual problem while trying to make his tenant pay $900 for rubbish removal: diplomatic immunity.
Chandler Investments Limited claimed its tenant, the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China, left a rented mews house in the capital, Wellington, without covering costs for cleaning, rubbish removal and key cutting.
Because renting a home was “incidental to the daily life of the diplomat” and profit was not being made from the arrangement, the exclusion was not upheld.
“I am not persuaded that the rental of a residential dwelling to an embassy would be commercial in nature, as the common law around diplomatic or sovereign immunity would consider it.”
Representatives of New Zealand’s foreign affairs and trade ministry were granted a right of appearance at the hearing, while neither of the parties in the dispute attended.
Tvarozkova was initially ordered to pay the money she owed to landlord, Matthew Ryan, but was later found to be exempted by diplomatic immunity.
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