Legal Assistance with Rental Disputes | Legal Aid Office

Questioner

We have a business where we rent out rooms as an intermediary. Now there was a catering company that acted as an intermediary to rent our hall to their customers, they paid us but we never had any contracts, now they want the money back because the hall is not going ahead on Friday 29-06-2012 because the bride is going to another hall and they said that we did not pay for the hall but we always settle that afterwards with the hall owner not in advance but there is a reservation for us. now she told me by email that her lawyer said that emails are not legally valid I don't think so. we had a conversation last Thursday that we would put everything on paper and have the hall prepared, we were also working on that but now they don't want it also they recorded everything during the conversation last Thursday via their mobile phone the conversations do not seem to me to be legally valid, I can let her know by email that we are not allowed to send mail. Oh yes, they had to, they didn't know that they had to pay the remainder 3 weeks before the start, I did send an email to the venue owner that a grandfather had passed away because we wanted to cover ourselves otherwise we would be stuck with that venue again, that was a best-intentioned lie, but they are going to call the venue owner behind our backs, who only said I won't get involved, you should go to Vepalux, that's the name of our company, they arrange the venues here, maybe you know what we should do about this because they are threatening us with lawyers and the police that we are cheating.

Lawyer

An email containing concrete agreements is just as legally valid as an oral and written contractual agreement. I would be happy to assist you with this, so please contact me so I can discuss how we can best approach this matter. a reservation has been made with you, and you must be reimbursed for this. If nothing has been agreed upon regarding reimbursement, you are not obliged to pay this. I would like to hear from you further

Lawyer

Emails are not as valid as regular letters. Even a verbal agreement is binding. The only question here is what you can and cannot prove. Especially if a response has been sent to an email, you are in a very strong position. I do not believe that another lawyer would have said anything different. This is really an ABC for practicing lawyers. The main rule is that if the agreement on rent has been made, payment must be made, unless there is force majeure on the part of your tenant. In my opinion, that is not the case here.