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Dr hab. Iwona Szymczak
ORCID: 0000-0002-5996-6075

Employee of the Faculty of Law and Administration at the University of Szczecin. She specialises in civil law, in particular property law and legal comparative analysis. Author of many studies in the field of civil law, and comparative legal studies.

 
DOI: 10.33226/0137-5490.2022.4.1
JEL: K2, K3

The subject of the legal analysis undertaken in this article is the nature of the settlement obligation imposed on the administrator of a multi-unit property. The purpose of the study will be to determine the legal nature of this obligation and its detailed content and scope. Two hypotheses will be considered — firstly, whether is that civil obligation arising from the management contract that the administrator concludes with the owners of the premises (or with a housing association), and secondly, whether the settlement obligation is a statutory obligation of the administrator resulting directly from the regulation of energy law. Then it should be treated as a public-law obligation. Determining the nature of this obligation is the basis for indicating who is liable to the energy entrepreneur for payment related to the heat supply service.

In order to verify these hypotheses a legal analysis on the status of the manager and the legal structure of the heated building on the basis of the Act on Ownership of Premises was made. Subsequently, it was analyzed who may be a party to the heat supply agreement, with particular emphasis on various variants of the legal status of the managing agent resulting from various management models referred to in the Act on the ownership of premises. Next, the second hypothesis was considered, namely whether, under the regulations of the energy law, the obligation of managing agent to settle costs may be considered as his additional obligation arising directly from the legal act (public obligation). Ultimately, the thesis about the public-law nature of the administrator's settlement obligation was adopted as the conclusion of this study.

Keywords: energy law; settlement obligation; property manager