Monthly Archives: October 2020

Tigers thump their retail landlord and Port Adelaide on the same day

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Dusty Martin’s reaction to the Court of Appeal’s judgment

Richmond Football Club had two big wins on Friday – one over Port Adelaide in the preliminary final and the other over a retail landlord in Victoria’s Court of Appeal.

One result gets the Tiges into the 2020 Grand Final; the other should win them lots of new fans among Victoria’s retail tenants.

The Court of Appeal’s decision is Verraty Pty Ltd v Richmond Football Club Ltd [2020] VSCA 267.

In short, it allows Richmond to rely on the Retail Leases Act (‘the Act’) to save a mountain of land tax and prune back some rent increases (the precise monetary consequences are not set out).

The decision confirms that a ‘retail premises lease’ once entered or renewed will not change its legal character during its term by reason of extraneous circumstances (such as rent increases). This is important because the Act gives various protections to tenants of ‘retail premises’ including (at s. 50) voiding any requirement in a lease that the tenant effectively pay its landlord’s land tax. These protections commonly make the question of whether a particular lease relates to ‘retail premises’ within the meaning of s. 4 of the Act financially significant for tenants and landlords.

The Act’s definition of ‘retail premises’ focuses on the retail supply of goods and services but it has several carve-outs. One of the exclusions is that premises with ‘occupancy costs’ of over $1 million per year are not ‘retail premises’. But what happens if the proper categorization of premises as ‘retail premises’ changes during the life of a lease?

This was the issue that arose between Richmond and its landlord, Verraty.

Since (at least) 2004, Richmond had leased a Wantirna pokies venue from Verraty. In 2004 the venue constituted ‘retail premises’ within the meaning of the Act.The written lease included a requirement that the tenant reimburse the landlord its annual land tax but, because the lease was a ‘retail premises lease,’ that requirement was unenforceable by reason of s. 50 of the Retail Leases Act.

Over time the property’s rent and outgoings increased. By May 2016 the tenant’s annual occupancy costs ticked over the $1 million mark. Did the fact that the occupancy costs now exceeded $1 million mean that the premises ceased to be ‘retail premises’ within the meaning of the Act and that the hitherto-void land tax clause hence suddenly became enforceable against Richmond?

The landlord took that argument to VCAT and won – see Verraty v Richmond Football Club [2019] VCAT 1073.

Richmond then appealed to the Supreme Court (Croft J in his final case before retirement from the bench) and won – see Richmond Football Club v Verraty [2019] VSC 597.

Verraty then appealed to the Court of Appeal. There Justices Kyrou, Kaye and Sifris dismissed Varraty’s appeal in a joint judgment. The nub of it is in para 8:

“… if a lease is a ‘retail premises’ lease at the commencement of the lease, it remains subject to the Act even if the premises cease to be retail premises. In short, the text, context and purpose of the Act strongly support the view that it is not possible [for a lease] to jump in and out of the Act from time to time depending on whether the premises continue to fall within the definition of ‘retail premises’.

The judgment is a ringing vindication of Croft J’s final Supreme Court judgment but it is silent on the question of whether leasing relationships can ‘jump’ in or out of the Act when leases are renewed (cf during a lease term). This question did not squarely arise in the Richmond v Verraty matter but Croft J nevertheless ventured an opinion on it in his judgment. He suggested (at paras 74 – 78) that whether premises could change their ‘retail premises’ characterization upon renewal of a lease depended upon the lease provisions regarding such renewals.

The Court of Appeal does not look at this question but it certainly approved of Croft J’s analysis generally.

Conclusions? Three occur to me.

  1. It is now settled that whether a lease is or is not a ‘retail premises lease’ is established on a ‘once and for all’ basis upon its entry or renewal. Its character won’t change during its term.
  2. It is less clear whether a lease can ‘jump’ upon renewal of a lease. For example, ‘retail premises’ under the Act exclude premises whose tenants are listed on the ASX. Despite this, Verraty suggests that the retail premises lease for a ‘Mum and Dad’ business will continue to be a retail premises lease even where the tenants sell their business and assign their lease to an ASX-listed company during the life of that lease. So if that ASX-listed assignee then exercises an option to renew the lease, what is the status of the resulting further term? Croft J implies the answer depends on the terms of the lease involved. The Court of Appeal does not express a view.
  3. Richmond is going into Grand Final Week on a winning streak on and off the field. This might be a bad omen for Geelong.

Time for a second wave of rent relief applications? Meet Victoria’s amended Covid-19 commercial leasing regime

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Victoria’s commercial leasing goalposts moved again last week with new regulations tweaking the Commercial Tenancy Relief Scheme (“CTRS”). As a result, most commercial tenants should probably now be making fresh rent relief applications to their landlords.

By way of background, I blogged about the original CTRS in May (see here). But in short, the CTRS is part of a national scheme to spread the financial pain of the Covid-19 pandemic between commercial landlords and their tenants. The newly updated Covid-19 Omnibus (Emergency Measures) (Commercial Leases and Licences) Regulations 2020 (“the Amended Regulations”) extend the CTRS until 31 December 2020 (see reg. 25 and the definition of ‘relevant period’) but they also do much else.

Here are four key changes I perceive in the Amended Regulations.

1. Fresh rent relief requests might now be necessary.

As in the original version of the CTRS, a commercial tenant will qualify for rent relief only if, first, it has an ‘eligible lease’ (which involves, among other things, participation in the Commonwealth’s ‘JobKeeper’ scheme) (see reg. 10(2)(b)) and, second, it makes a written request for rent relief that complies with reg. 10. The wrinkle is that reg. 10 was changed by last week’s amendments, and the information prescribed for the tenant’s request is now greater than before. One example of the effects of the changes to reg. 10 is that a tenant’s written rent relief request to a landlord could comply with reg. 10 on 28 September 2020 without specifying the tenant’s decline in turnover as “a whole percentage”. On 29 September 2020 that same written request would not have complied with the (newly amended) reg. 10.

This is problematic for several reasons. The Amended Regulations were made on 29 September 2020 but “are taken to have come into operation on 29 March 2020” (reg. 3). Put another way, the Amended Regulations’ commencement pre-dates their very publication by precisely 6 months. So is our hypothetical tenant’s compliant rent relief request of 28 September 2020 still valid today? (Think of all the billable hours likely to be exhausted exploring this question.)

Even assuming this particular absurdity can be safely navigated in our hypothetical tenant’s favour (and I think it can be only partially), what is the status of tenants’ pre-29 September rent relief requests for post-29 September 2020 rent if their earlier rent relief requests do not comply with the 29 September 2020 version of reg. 10? (Reg. 10(4)(a) implies that a landlord is under no obligation to give its tenant rent relief for any period before the landlord receives a written request from the tenant that conforms with the reg. 10(1).)

The Small Business Commission is central to the administration of the CTRS. It has already noticed this complication and sought to deal with it by publishing this template rent relief request for tenants to send to their landlords. It is feasible that some tenants will have already accidentally provided their landlords all the information prescribed by the new reg. 10, but such serendipitous advance compliance is likely to be rare. As the tenant’s compliant written request is both important and free, most tenants will probably be best served by completing the SBC’s template document asap and firing it off to their landlords. Every day they delay is potentially costing them rent relief to which they are otherwise entitled.

Back in April, the National Cabinet published the Mandatory Code of Conduct Contrary on SME Commercial Leasing Principles during Covid 19. That document created an expectation (but no actual legal requirement) that landlords would grant rent relief which was at least proportionate to their commercial tenants’ loss of turnover. That expectation was not reflected in Victoria’s original CTRS regulations. Confusion ensued. This has now changed. The Amended Regulations do have such a proportionality requirement (see reg. 10(4)(ba)). Landlords must offer their tenants within 14 days of a compliant request, rent relief “at a minimum, proportional to the decline in the tenant’s turnover” associated with the rented premises.

2. Proportional rent relief as a minimum is now unambiguous.

Note that the proportional rent relief is a minimum rather than a fixed empirical requirement – a tenant might legitimately and candidly argue for a higher percentage of rent relief than the loss of turnover it has actually experienced.

The Amended Regulations maintain the original CTRS requirement that, unless otherwise agreed by the tenant, rent relief (whatever the amount) will be granted by landlords permanently waiving one half of the rent relief amount (see reg. 10(4)(b)) with the balance of the rent relief to be dealt with by way of deferral (see reg. 16(2)) or otherwise.

3. Even stony broke landlords are now required to donate blood to their haemorrhaging tenants.

The original CTRS regulations included (at reg. 10(4)(d)(iv)) an effective requirement that rent relief be calculated by reference to factors including “a landlord’s financial ability to offer rent relief”. Regulation 10(4)(d)(iv) has been deleted by the Amended Regulations. The potential effect is that some cash-strapped landlords might now be compelled to provide rent relief to their tenants even where that rent relief is likely to drive those landlords to insolvency.

4. A pseudo fix to jawboning as a delay tactic?

The very foundation of the original CTRS was that a qualifying tenant could not be evicted for non-payment of rent until the revised CTRS rent had been either agreed or fixed by VCAT. In my May blog I perceived a scenario where a cynical tenant might go on an effective rent strike under the pretext that it was negotiating with the landlord while knowing that the growing queue of litigants for a (largely shut-down) VCAT meant that those “negotiations” might drag on inconclusively for years. The Amended Regulations now offer tenants (but not landlords) the near-term possibility of obtaining from the Small Business Commission a binding order for rent relief (see Division 1A of the Amended Regulations). Such binding orders are likely to be relatively quick (at least compared to the VCAT route) and might be useful to some tenants requiring short term certainty (e.g. for business sales, partnership dissolutions, etc) but most tenants are likely to find them very unattractive for several reasons.

The most obvious disincentive to a tenant seeking a binding order is strategic. If a tenant has effectively suspended its landlord’s ability to evict it for non-payment of rent pending a very distant adjudication by VCAT, why would that tenant want to disrupt the status quo by seeking a binding order from the Small Business Commission? It sounds to me a bit like Roadrunner proposing a coin toss to Wyle E Coyote – essentially foolhardy.

And a landlord’s equivalent near-term options if rent relief negotiations reach an impasse? Scant indeed, on my reading of the Amended Regulations.

There are many other oddities in the Amended Regulations. These are surely not the last amendments to the CTRS that we will see.

ADDENDUM – 22 MARCH 2021 UPDATE

See this update for a contrary view from VCAT about the need for fresh rent relief requests after 29 September 2020.

For whom the Bell tolls

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Alan Bond (pre-Bell collapse, fraud conviction and bankruptcy) with a mate

There is something uplifting in properly farewelling the dead and the dying.

The Economist’s weekly obituary always floats my boat (here is its recent goodbye to Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a sample). Ditto almost anything from Nick Cave’s vast anthology of dirges (including the Sydney Opera House’s spine-tingling cover of The Ship Song). Gabrielle Faure’s Requiem is my perfect breakfast soundtrack (although it does cause my family to fling toast at me).

Maybe Master Sanderson of the Western Australian Supreme Court has similar tastes.

He has just added a nine paragraph Corporations Law judgment to the genre. It’s beautiful.

In a mere 675 words he retells the story of the Bell litigation which is now being laid to rest after 25+ exhausting years, makes some final formal orders, and even includes some wry funnies along the way.

It might well be the very first and last Corporations Act judgment you actually enjoy reading from start to finish.

Here it is: Bell Group (UK) Holdings Ltd (in liq) [2020] WASC 347.

And to give it context, here is the ABC’s take on the wider saga.