AN ASSOCIATION of private property owners is embroiled in an ugly dispute that has resulted in at least four police reports, one lawsuit and a company locked out of its premises.
The dispute is threatening the operations of the Association of Management Corporations in Singapore (Amcis).
The association was formed five years ago to help condo owners run their estates better. It is seen as spokesman for more than 50,000 residents.
Problems surfaced earlier this year, when disagreements within its management committee caused founding president Francis Zhan to resign in May.
Mr Zhan wrote a letter to some condominium management corporations in July, alleging that members in Amcis' management committee threatened to deplete its funds. The funds are estimated to be $150,000 now.
The 'deviant' group, as he called them in a letter, had passed a resolution in his absence last November to pay each committee member $20 per meeting for transport costs.
Mr Zhan also pointed out that a member of the current committee had asked Amcis to pick up the $200 tab for a lunch meeting that some committee members held at The Pines club in May.
He then collected signatures to try to convene an extraordinary general meeting to protect the association's financial reserves, as well as elect a new management committee. The current Amcis management said the letter was defamatory and responded by demanding that Regent Garden condo, whose management corporation is headed by Mr Zhan, resign from the association or be expelled.
It also sued Mr Zhan to recover items like a register of Amcis members, bank statements, cheque books and agreements between the association and other companies, which it said he was holding on to.
On Aug 18, Amcis' acting president, Mr George Gomes, made a report to the Commercial Affairs Department alleging that Mr Zhan had mismanaged its funds while he was president.
On Monday, the stakes were raised again when Mr Zhan, who is director of an Amcis-related company that is the master tenant of a five-storey office building in Upper Circular Road, locked a company out of its office there.
Mr Zhan told The Straits Times that the company had not shown him a tenancy agreement. But Mr Gomes said that another director of the Amcis-related company, Amcis Management Services, had recently signed the lease.
Mr Zhan subsequently changed the security access cards required to enter the building.
Mr Gomes, who made a police report on Wednesday, told The Straits Times: 'This is out of order....He is holding the building hostage.'
Mr Gomes said the increasingly acrimonious dispute was putting him and his other five committee members under pressure, but they felt duty-bound to expose the alleged mismanagement of funds.
He said: 'It's turning septic. But I cannot walk out, or some day it'll come back to haunt me.'
Mr Zhan, meanwhile, said: 'All I want to see is that the funds collected over the years to be used for the community are not squandered.'
Caught in the middle are people like Ms Jasz Mok, 21, the receptionist at the Upper Circular Road office, who was asked by Mr Gomes to go on leave because of the impasse.
She told The Straits Times: 'It's getting messier day by day. I don't know how to face it.'
tanhy@sph.com.sg
