The Korean Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the tenant of a shop who faced an eviction request from his landlord for not paying the rent, by upholding the deduction of an amount corresponding to six months’ rent from the overdue, so that the conditions for the termination of the rent were not met.
The landlord had first requested the eviction in 2018, but later a mediation attempt had decided that the eviction would have been carried if the overdue amount had reached at least three months of rent. After subsequent failings in payments, the landlord notified the tenant about the eviction. However, the tenant invoked the Article 10 Clause 9 of the revised Commercial Building Lease Protection Act, which protected small business owners affected by the Covid-19 pandemic by providing that from September 2020 an overdue amount corresponding to six months of rent could not be considered as a basis for eviction.
Both the first and the second instance court applied the act and deducted six months of rent from the overdue amount, so that the remaining amount fell below the three months’ threshold fixed during the mediation procedure in 2018.
The Supreme Court, by rejecting an appeal filed by the landlord, confirmed such view.
