When Justice Comes Due: a Story That Must Not Be Time-Barred
Can you imagine someone simply taking away your apartment or business premises? And not someone from the street, but someone you even trusted to represent you legally. The story of the Mayer Pignatelli family reads like a tense legal thriller. This story exposes how unreliable the protection of the rule of law can sometimes be. Especially if on the other side is someone who has power, connections and the right surname.
The key defense in this story is revindication, a lawsuit for the return of unlawfully taken property. It is a defense that, in a rule-of-law state, overcomes occasional abuses of the system because it guarantees the rightful owner that their right never becomes time-barred. One must persist, especially against anomalies in the judicial system.
Federico and Luigi Pignatelli, descendants of an Italian noble family on their father's side and the Ljubljana entrepreneurial Mayer family on their mother's side, founded in 1993 the company EUROCAPITAL PARTNERS ESTATE d.o.o. to manage the property at Wolfova 1 in Ljubljana, which had been returned to the family. As foreigners they hired local lawyer Tjaša Andree Prosenc for assistance, who was supposed to help them handle legal matters and who also lived in that building.
However, the lawyer, instead of looking after her clients' interests, looked after her own. And she did so by abusing trust and fraud, by obtaining an illegal entry in the court register with forged documents, and then transferring ownership of the apartment and two business premises to herself and her son Gregor Prosenc.
When Federico and Luigi Pignatelli quite by chance learned that the lawyer had cheated them, a calvary with the Slovenian judiciary and corrupt networks that suffocate justice in Slovenia began. After they changed the entry in the court register and thereby restored the lawful situation, they of course filed a lawsuit seeking the annulment of that illegal resolution from 1999, when the lawyer entered an unlawful representative of the company in the court register, namely their mother Doris Mayer.
Slovenian courts to this day have not established the nullity of that resolution nor consequently the nullity of all the acts that followed from that illegal step. Federico persists in the fight for his family's rights and in 2022 he again filed a lawsuit for annulment. However, the court does not even undertake fact-finding in this case, but again dismissed the lawsuit as too late. Even though these are matters that never become time-barred.
The court looks at the matter differently and rather than fundamental legal principles pedantically holds that under Article 391 of the Companies Act a resolution of the general meeting can be declared void only within three years of its entry in the court register. The Court Register Act also stipulates that nullity can be asserted only within three years of the entry. And the entry happened back in 1999. Federico argued that the resolution was clearly illegal and immoral, yet the court did not recognize his right to judicial protection because the deadline had expired.
It is established in law that when someone unlawfully takes your property, you can always use revindication, regardless of how much time has passed since the act. Revindication is not tied to time limits. Therefore, in the fight for the rights of the Mayer Pignatelli family it is only a question of when and at which instance they will finally achieve the return of the unlawfully dispossessed property.
Conditions for revindication are: 1) The owner has proof of ownership. 2) The thing is possessed by someone who has no right to possess it. 3) The thing was taken without the consent of the lawful owner.
In this story those conditions are quite evident. The properties were transferred to the lawyer and her son on the basis of forged documents, the owners never consented to the sale and the owners never received the purchase price.
With its reasoning the court confirmed that the act was questionable and immoral, yet it still cannot be the subject of judicial protection because too much time has passed. This decision is contrary to the fundamental principles of law and legal protection.
The Wolfova 1 case of course is not isolated. Many believed in the rule of law, yet the Slovenian judiciary has left them in the lurch. A request for annulment of resolutions can literally be recognized as late, but property rights remain protected by legal remedies such as revindication. And therefore this kind of injustice never becomes time-barred.
If the story of Emerik Mayer shows how after decades it was possible to cleanse a man's name and undo the consequences of wartime crimes against the Mayer family, then the story of his grandson is also not yet over. A right that is delayed is not necessarily a right that has died. It is merely a right that has not yet come up for its turn.