MIND YOUR HIRE PURCHASE AGREEMENT

MIND YOUR HIRE PURCHASE AGREEMENT

Today at Apex Chambers we received a call from a prospective client. He was a party to a hire purchase agreement in which he had given out his vehicle to the hirer, and, quite unfortunately, he had encountered some serious issues during the course of execution of the hire purchase agreement.

He had met a dead end; a brick wall in the true sense of the word. He needed legal guidance on how best to tackle the issues. Thankfully, the agreement was in writing.

He booked an appointment with us and was right on time. He came with the hire purchase agreement. It was a poorly drafted agreement lacking in the major ingredients of a true hire purchase agreement.

We went into a consultancy session and we took him by the hand, painstakingly dissected the hire purchase issues he was facing including, but not limited to, how inadequate and inelegant the content and substance of the hire purchase agreement were, and offered him comprehensive legal guidance on how best to navigate the issues at hand.

Tips on hire purchase agreements, particularly as the vehicle owner.

1. Secretly investigate the hirer with a view to unmasking his true nature, character, moral capacity, idiosyncrasies, beliefs, antecedents and the likes.

2. Accept only guarantors or sureties with easily verifiable means of livelihood, strong financial capability, easy to access and good legal standing. Don’t rely on verbal assurances.

You do not want to have on your hands a guarantor with no meaningful financial standing. The aim of guarantorship would have been defeated.

3. Let the draft hire purchase agreement be comprehensive. Don’t leave any term to conjecture. Don’t rely on implied terms, instead have express terms. It is difficult to achieve this without a Business Lawyer. Don’t fall into the grave error of assuming you can do it yourself. The outcome may be disastrous.

So get a very experienced Business Lawyer, let him in on every single detail of the transaction and let him help you produce a hire purchase agreement that covers all fields and leaves no margin of error.

4. Ensure the hire purchase agreement is properly signed. Not signing it correctly may detract from the binding legal effect or vitiate the efficacy of the agreement. You don’t want that.

I have seen instances where the witnessing column of an agreement is filled and signed by a party to the agreement with his name boldly written in that column.

5. Ensure that the agreement expressly provides that the vehicle owner will have the right to retrieve the vehicle when the hirer defaults either in making payments in instalment or violates any other stated legal obligation (like not embarking on maintenance, not effecting repairs, negligence) under the hire purchase agreement.

6. Keep all records of financial inflows (i.e. payments made) from the hirer with full details of amounts, dates, modes of payments and with each data entry signed by both parties.

Be mindful of these so you can enjoy the benefits of hire purchase.
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APEX CHAMBERS, Property/Real Estate and Business/Corporate /Commercial Lawyers, Attorneys, Barristers, Solicitors Advocates, Legal Practitioners rendering legal services, Legal Consultants and Notary Public in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria

Phone: +234(0)7030868694 (Calls & Whatsapp)
Email: info@apexchambersglobal.com
Website: www.apexchambersglobal.com