dr Radosław Wiśniewski | In Principle

Like any other legal form, a family foundation may also involve the risk that the management of assets will be delegated to incompetent persons, the foundation will act in a manner contrary to its stated purpose or the interests of its beneficiaries, or it will conduct business activity in areas not permitted for a family foundation. However, in the Family Foundations Act, the Polish parliament has provided certain tools to prevent such situations.

The Family Foundations Act, entering into force on 22 May 2023, introduces the family foundation into Polish law as a new legal entity designed for collecting property and managing assets in accordance with the founder’s will and paying benefits to beneficiaries. Therefore, the objectives of a family foundation are different from those of existing foundations, which are non-governmental organisations operating for public benefit and not for profit.

In this episode of "News from Poland - Business & Law" Radosław Wiśniewski will tell you about the government’s plans to replace the right of perpetual usufruct of real estate with the right of ownership.

On the residential construction market in Poland, currently dominated by real estate developers, housing cooperatives can begin building starting 1 March 2023, when the new Housing Cooperatives Act enters into force, introducing a framework for their activities and providing incentives for such grassroots construction initiatives.

The government’s draft reform of perpetual usufruct in Poland focuses on changing the rules and method for determining the price for sale of a property to its perpetual usufructuary. Additionally, perpetual usufructuaries are granted a claim to acquire the property they hold. This is part of the process of phasing out perpetual usufruct entirely.

Effective as of 1 July 2022, the new Developers Act expands the scope of bank oversight of development ventures before paying out to the developer the funds due for a given phase of the project. But the regulations are imprecise, and it is unclear whether the bank must redo the audit when the buyer has made a late payment of funds into an open housing escrow account.

Many investors and their lawyers consider property restitution, or as we call it in Poland, reprivatisation, to be a purely historical phenomenon. The aim of this article is to analyse if it is true and whether restitution claims are completely irrelevant to real estate investments in Poland.

Dr Radosław Wiśniewski explains the problem of claims by pre-war property owners (and most often their heirs), which must be taken into account when purchasing real estate and pose a risk for transactions.

The provisions of the Administrative Procedure Code amended on 11 August 2021 regarding the time limits for invalidating administrative decisions or finding that they were issued unlawfully will come into force on 16 September 2021. What are the real consequences of this amendment? They seem inconsistent with the pronouncements of Poland’s highest state authorities.

It is often assumed that a forced share of an inheritance is only valid if the succession is based on a will. But the Polish Civil Code does not preclude heirs from seeking a forced share when succeeding under the code. This applies primarily to situations where the testator gave away significant portions of his property or made a specific bequest of them.

Amended regulations governing claims by former owners under the Warsaw Decree entered into force on 20 October 2020. Consequently, the only form of reprivatisation in Warsaw admissible in practice will be damages pursued through complicated, time-consuming and costly judicial proceedings, while a large portion of claims will be extinguished without compensation.

In judgments dated 22 May 2019, the Province Administrative Court in Warsaw issued its first extensive ruling on the condition of possession under the Warsaw Decree. The court held that this condition applied only to the legal successors of the prior owner of the real estate and was a condition for effective filing of a decree application, not granting of the application. And after 1946, this condition became irrelevant.