Is the trustee responsible for someone else’s belongings?
In brief
- When a trustee ends a lease agreement, they are required to clear the rented property, occasionally even removing items not part of the estate.
- The Supreme Court ruled on 10 October 2025 that failure to do so may be unlawful under certain circumstances.
- This ruling increases the responsibility of the trustee in evictions following bankruptcy.
A trustee who terminates a lease agreement pursuant to Article 39 of the Bankruptcy Act (Faillissementswet) must clear the rented property. This means, among other things, that they must remove items belonging to the estate from the rented property. This follows from a classic ruling on estate debts (Koot Beheer/Tideman et al.). Last Friday (10 October 2025), the Supreme Court ruled that this obligation can also extend to items that are no (longer) part of the estate.
Background
In this case, it concerned items (containers) with a negative value. Removing the containers involved significant costs. Before the bankruptcy, the containers had become the property of the lessor through accession (Section 5:20 of the Dutch Civil Code). The trustee decided not to remove the containers.
Estate debt?
A debate has arisen in the literature as to whether a trustee is obliged to remove the containers in a situation like this, and whether this should be regarded as an estate debt or as an objective legal obligation. An obligation in the latter category must be fulfilled in any case, regardless of whether the estate has sufficient resources, argues Van Zanten, among others. Wahlbrinck (JOR 2024/178) believes—referring to De Ranitz et al./Receiver and PaperlinX—that this is a bridge too far.
Supreme Court
In its ruling of 10 October 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that under certain circumstances a trustee has a legal obligation to remove items that do not form part of the estate. In other words, a trustee may act unlawfully if they do not remove the checked, worthless containers. The Supreme Court does not go into the factual assessment and does not dedicate any considerations to the circumstances under which this might or might not be the case.
