Why waste your own time with this? If it's your house, you own everything inside. I would put all the cameras in the trash and forget about it.
25 years passed. My mother started variously selling and disposing of their slowly rotting crap that they evidently were never going to collect, as she wanted to fix the structural issues with the barn, and their stuff was in the way, as it literally filled the entire ground floor.
And then, one day, 30 years later, their children showed up, wanting to collect their inheritance.
They sued. They won. She had to fork over about €100k.
So no, just because you own the house, you don’t own everything in it.
In Europe, it’s also common for you to buy a place, and then when you move in, you find the vendor has taken all of the wiring and plumbing with them. Sometimes they’ll even take things like doors, staircases, floors, you name it.
You can't just lump 27 countries with wildly differing laws together like this.
You have to ensure the contract of sale specifically includes things like wiring, the boiler, the radiators, flooring, light fittings and switches, because if they aren’t explicitly included, they aren’t included. There are some very odd definitions of chattels vs fixtures out there - in France, it has to be nailed to the structure to count as a fixture. If it’s screwed, glued, or otherwise not nailed down, it’s a chattel.
This is the first time I hwar of this.
At least in Norway the rule is that everything that is built in stays.
So table, chairs, TV, washing machine, dryer etc goes, but built in appliances and built in place furniture stays.
Does England count as Europe?
Abandoned property is just that.
She was actually lucky to avoid criminal charges.
Abandonment should be measured at the takeover of property in lieu of agreement, and a reasonable time frame for pickup agreement is on the order of days, not years.
At that point just lie and say that it never happened.
Or that the preperty was just some dishes or something.
The owner died in the early 90s - the folks who rocked up were the grandchildren of her ex-husband.
As for people who have said “oh she should have charged for the storage” - that would have been nice, but that wasn’t the agreement, and French law treats a verbal agreement as a contract, and also places the onus in this type of situation on the person holding the goods to make extensive efforts to contact the owner and/or their heirs.
There was recently a case in the press where person sold “old junk” to an antique dealer. Antique dealer sells it at auction for fortune. Antique dealer is then forced to hand over full sum to person who sold old junk/priceless antique.
Squatters rights are incredible. A friend had their house occupied one winter while they were away, 16 years ago. The squatters had a baby. They are only legally allowed to remove them this year, when the child turns 18.
The napoleonic code. This is why France is full of abandoned properties, stuck in probate for all eternity, as finding and getting hundreds of heirs to unanimously agree on a sale or whatever is… hard.
True, but the thing with verbal agreements is that it's very difficult to prove what was agreed upon.
Your mother should have just lied.
LOL!
No. This is not common at all.
I've seen it from disgruntled former renters, but that's it.
It's also illegal.
And before I get called naive, courts do look very favorably upon defendants that are nice.