Joint Ownership
Article 701 of the Civil Code defines joint ownership as those who jointly own the goods due to the community formed in accordance with the law or the agreements stipulated in the law. As a continuation article, the form of management of joint ownership is determined with the statement that “in joint ownership, the partners do not have determined shares, and the right of each of them is common to all of the goods entering into the partnership. These issues should be taken into consideration in the conversion of joint ownership into shared ownership.
Our Civil Code has categorized the establishment of a joint partnership in 3 groups: general property partnership, family property partnership, ordinary partnership from the husband and wife property regime. Unlike all of these forms of establishment, in case of management, there is no share that the partners can save on their shares. Only in case of liquidation, the partners share their shares. As a matter of fact, unless otherwise agreed or unless a representative is appointed, the shareholders are required to decide unanimously for both management and savings transactions.
Cases of Termination
Unanimous ownership is terminated by the transfer of the property, dissolution of the community or conversion to shared ownership. Pursuant to Article 703, it is possible to terminate the partnership in the event that the property is transferred to another person by unanimous consent or converted into shared ownership by consent. The right of a partner outside the inheritance partnership to sue for the conversion of unanimous ownership into shared ownership is not regulated.
In practice, the reflections of the joint ownership require the partnership to act together for the estate/property/partnership in any case, and does not grant a separate disposition authority to a partner. As a matter of fact, the most common issue in practice, and the subject of this article, is the management of the partnership regarding the money inherited by inheritance and deposited in the bank or the money of the heir in the bank.
Allocation of the heir’s money in the bank to the partners
In Article 640 of the Civil Code, it is stated that upon the death of the heir, a partnership covering all rights and debts in the inheritance will occur between the heirs until the sharing, and that the heirs will own the inheritance unanimously. As a matter of fact, it is not possible for the heir who has a share in the liquidation of the money inherited by inheritance or in the possession of the heir to apply to the bank and claim his/her share. Today, many citizens are faced with non-payment of the money, even if they apply to the banks where the money is located, in order to pay the relevant share to their heirs. For this reason, since it is accepted that the shares of the partners in joint ownership are common to the rights of each of them, in accordance with the mandatory provision of Article 640 of the Civil Code, either a representative must be appointed to the partnership or the partnership must be converted into a shared ownership in order for the shareholders to gain the authority to dispose of the property on their own or for the price to be divided separately by the shareholders.
In addition to the foregoing, with its decision numbered 2006/19-552 E, 2006/589 K., the General Assembly of the Court of Cassation emphasized that the shares of the estate in the inheritance partnership belong to the partnership without separation and that the heirs do not have independent shares in the continuation of the partnership, and stated that in order to pay the money in the bank, only the heirs who have a share in the estate should apply to the bank together or appoint a representative or the partnership should be converted to share ownership. On the other hand, it is undoubtedly that converting the joint ownership into a shared ownership and opening the way for the shareholders to save in proportion to their shares will provide convenience in terms of implementation. Otherwise, the bank will not fulfill the request if the bank is applied to the bank with joint ownership.
