The Supreme Court has unanimously upheld an order for a woman to pay 403,047 euros to an architect who drew up plans for a luxury house in Agioi Trimithias that was never built. The court found that he had completed the architectural study and that the project was worth around 4.5 million Cyprus pounds, not the 500,000 she claimed. The valuation was decisive because his fee was a share of the project’s value: six per cent for the study and one per cent for supervision.
The woman hired the architect in July 2002 to prepare the study and related work. Construction never started, and the project was abandoned after her husband died in January 2004.
Disputed valuation
The architect said he had finished the study, including the drawings, the tender terms and the procedures for obtaining the necessary permits. The woman disputed the terms and scope of the agreement. She said the documents had been signed blank and that the study was never completed. In her view the project was worth about 500,000 pounds, the figure that appeared in documents submitted to the authorities.
Nicosia District Court rejected her case and valued the planned house at 4,500,000 pounds. It also weighed evidence from a registered quantity surveyor, who put the cost at 4,549,857 pounds. The District Court found that the study had been completed and that the agreement was severable, so the architect was entitled to his six per cent for that part of the work.
The Supreme Court said it saw no reason to interfere with the District Court’s assessment of the evidence. An appeal court does not overturn findings on credibility unless they are clearly wrong, defy common sense or lack sufficient grounding in the evidence, it said.
The court looked in particular at the gap between the two valuations. The figure in the official documents was not binding on the project’s real value, it ruled, because the District Court had weighed all the evidence and accepted the expert’s estimate.
Legality argument rejected
The lower cost stated in those documents did not make the agreement illegal either, the court said. Illegality had not been expressly pleaded. The evidence before the court also did not show any obvious illegality when the agreement was made, at least not without further investigation. Illegal conduct in carrying out an otherwise lawful contract does not automatically make the contract itself illegal, the ruling said.
The court also ruled that the documents did not stop the architect claiming a higher value. The real value could be proved through other admissible evidence, and the 4.5 million-pound estimate rested on material the District Court had assessed.
The court confirmed that the contract was severable, meaning its parts could be treated separately, because the fee was clearly split between the study and supervision. Completing the study therefore entitled the architect to that share of the fee on its own, even though the project never reached the construction stage.
The appeal was dismissed in full, and the woman was ordered to pay 3,500 euros in appeal costs, plus VAT if applicable.
