PARTLY DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE BRATZA , JOINED BY JUDGE PAVLOVSCHI

1 . At the heart of this case is the applicant company ’ s complaint that, having in 1999 purchased the “Dacia” hotel in a public auction for a sum in excess of the reserve price set by the Auction Commission and having paid in full the purchase price within the extended period set by the Commission and thereafter invested substantial sums in renovating and refurnishing the property, it was, some 4 years later, deprived of its title to the hotel when the sale contract was annulled by the Economic Court of Moldova. Not only was the company required to return the hotel to the State Chancellery, its former administrator, but it recovered only the original purchase price, a sum which was in the event only fully repaid some 16 months after the contract had been annulled.

2. For the reasons stated in the judgment, I consider that the applicant company ’ s rights under Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 have been violated. Even assuming that the annulment and consequent deprivation of the applicant ’ s property may be said to have served the public interest, the applicant company was required to bear an individual and excessive burden, such that a fair balance was not preserved.

3 . An important part of the Court ’ s reasoning in reaching this conclusion relates to the fact that it was the State authorities which in 1999 prepared the hotel for sale, which set the rules for the auction, which determined the reserve price and which carried out the auction proceedings (paragraph 65). However, it was not until 2003 that the same State authorities, acting through the Prosecutor General ’ s Office, sought to annul the sale contract on the grounds that the formal requirements for the sale had not been satisfied, that the purchase price was less than the hotel ’ s real value and that the price had not been paid within 7 days of the date of the auction. Although the authorities must have been aware of each of these alleged grounds for annulling the contract from the outset, or at latest by 30 August 2000 when the criminal investigation into the alleged unlawfulness of the privatisation of the hotel was closed, no explanation has been offered as to why 4 years were allowed to elapse before the annulment proceedings were commenced. As in the Beyeler case ( Beyeler v. Italy [GC], no. 33202/96, § 120, ECHR 2000-I), this failure on the part of the authorities to act “in good time, in an appropriate manner and with utmost consistency” was, in my view, a factor of central importance in assessing the reasonableness and proportionality of the interference with the applicant company ’ s prope rty rights.

4. Having concluded that the applicant ’ s rights under the Protocol were violated, the majority of the Court have gone on to find an additional violation of Article 6 § 1 on the grounds that it was contrary to the principle of equality of arms that the State authorities should have been permitted by

Article 86 of the Civil Code to lodge claims beyond the 3-year limitation period applicable to private individuals. It is said that no reasons have been given for exempting certain litigants, such as State authorities, from the obligation to observe established limitation periods and that this exemption gave a discriminatory advantage to the State (paragraph 76). It is further said (paragraph 77), drawing on the C ourt ’ s Popov judgment ( Popov v. Moldova (No. 2), no. 19860/04, § 53, 6 December 2005), that the altering of a legal situation which should have become final had the limitation period applied without such discrimination was incompatible with the principle of legal certainty.

5. I regret that I am unable to support this conclusion of the majority. The applicant company has not made any claim of discriminatory treatment under Article 14 of the Convention. While it has certainly alleged a breach of the principle of equality of arms, I have considerable doubt as to the applicability of that principle to the present case in which the company complains not that it was denied an opportunity in the proceedings to present its case under conditions that did not place it at a substantial disadvantage vis-à-vis the State authorities, but that domestic law permitted the State authorities to bring the proceedings in the first place. I am similarly unpersuaded that the fact that the 3-year limitation period did not apply to bar the proceedings was necessarily incompatible with Article 6 on the grounds that it violated the principle of legal certainty, a principle which has been developed (as in the Popov case) in the context of the quashing of a final court judgment.

6 . In the end, however, I would prefer to leave these questions undecided since I consider that the applicant ’ s complaint under Article 6 of the Convention is effectively absorbed in the Court ’ s finding of a violation of Article 1 of the Protocol. As stated above, the essential problem raised by the case is not the fact that domestic law permitted the State authorities to bring the annulment proceedings more than 3 years after the contract was concluded but the fact that those authorities unreasonably delayed before commencing those proceedings. The Court having already taken this factor into account in finding a violation of the Protocol, it was in my view unnecessary to go on to examine separately the issues raised under Article 6 of the Convention.