Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Rent control, the princess and the G

What's in an initial? Free (nearly) rent for life at the commoner's expense, in NYC (of course);
She is the widowed Afghan princess wife of the man known as the 'Last Ottoman Sultan' and is battling eviction from her $390 a month rent controlled Lexington Avenue, Manhattan apartment.
Her Imperial Highness Zeynep Osman, 69, has been asked to vacate the two-story apartment she calls home in the $10.1 million Upper East Side building she has lived in since her marriage to Ertogroul Osman in 1991.
Like her husband, who would have assumed the throne in Istanbul of the now-defunct Ottoman Empire as Sultan in 1994, Zeynep was expelled from her home in Afghanistan and is refusing to leave because she has 'become accustomed to a certain lifestyle'.
The owner of the building had a court order her evicted, but
He claims that upon purchasing the property, which has a restaurant on the ground floor, he was given only one lease which dated from 1977 that has expired to become a month-to-month occupancy.
Therefore, he claims he is well within his rights to ask the Afghan princess to leave the rent-controlled home.

However, Zeynep's lawyer, who she retains at the cost of thousands of dollars a month discovered a crucial detail on the eviction notice.
It was addressed to 'E. Osman and G. Osman', or more to the point, the would-be Sultan's first wife, Gulda, who passed away in 1985.
'You can’t evict a dead person,' Maddy Tarnofsky, Zeynep’s lawyer, said....
But you can charge them for billable hours.

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