The man was evicted from the rented apartment and the arrears went into foreclosure. Years later, no one could prove that he had signed a lease let alone lived in the apartment. Someone had lived there, however.
Public utility and YH-kodit, which owns affordable rental apartments, got into a special legal dispute with a “ghost tenant” in Turku.
The deal started at the turn of 2003–2004, when the rental company made a normal lease agreement for an apartment located in Turku's Länsikeskus.
Everything went well for almost five years, until in 2009 the tenant stopped paying his rent.
The tenant was evicted from the apartment by a unilateral judgment of the district court. It means that the tenant either stayed out of the trial or did not submit his position to the court.
Therefore, the rent arrears were transferred to the enforcement authority for collection. At the beginning of 2010, the bailiff stated when executing the eviction that the tenant had already left the apartment. Almost 6,000 euros of rent remained unpaid.
For years after that, the man started demanding a change to the unilateral judgment with a so-called restitution application. With it, you can apply for an appeal against a unilateral judgment within 30 days after the decision has been verifiably notified to the party concerned.
When the case came up in court in 2022, the judge stated that the man may not have received information about the decision, or at least there is no evidence of it.
The man said that he had never signed a lease in Turku and did not live in that apartment at all.
According to the population information system, he had lived in Helsinki until March 2003. He had no address at all between March 2003 and December 2004. From the end of 2004 until the summer of 2010, the address was found again in Helsinki. The man also adamantly claimed that he lived in the capital.
YH-kodit claimed to have checked the man's identity when renting the apartment, but was unable to provide proof of this years later. The rental agreement had already been destroyed, and it could not be presented in court.
There was also such a special feature in the matter that the rents had been paid for years without fault. Someone had also been able to pay the right amount of rent, even though there had been index increases that had been sent to the rental apartment by mail.
When the supposed tenant was evicted in 2009, he did not react in any way to the move invitation sent to him at the Helsinki address. According to the court, it was possible that the mail did not reach him or that he did not react because he had never rented an apartment.
Ulosotto, however, managed to collect arrears from the man, but the passivity still continued. In court, he said that he found out about the whole thing on the Helsinki Foreclosure website afterwards.
The court stated that a person with a lot of debts in foreclosure may not have realized it right away.
“Or if the person's affairs have for some reason been poorly handled, the unjustified debt collection may also have gone unhandled,” the court continued.
As a result, the court ordered YH-koti to pay back the collected arrears to the man, because the rental company was unable to prove that the man had lived in the apartment or had ever entered into any kind of rental agreement.
The only possible explanation for what happened was the theory presented by the man in court. He stated that it has now become clear to him that his father, with whom he has not kept in touch, would have lived in the apartment in question. However, he could not tell where he had received the information.
The district court's verdict was handed down in December. YH-kodit has applied for leave to appeal in the case from the Court of Appeal.
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