Inheritance and Property Law · 2 min read · 2026-08
Can a legal mortgage registered to secure a sultă payment be cancelled?
If enforcing a sultă, the balancing payment owed after a partition, is time-barred, the court can order the mortgage struck off. A ruling did this recently.
Context
After a partition, it is not unusual for one co-owner to receive title to a property subject to an obligation to pay a sultă to the other co-owners. To secure that obligation, the law creates a legal mortgage over the property in favour of the creditors.
But what happens when the sultă is not claimed for years, and the creditors take no steps to recover it?
The situation examined by the court
In a recent case, the claimants asked the court to declare time-barred the right to enforce a sultă set by a partition ruling and, as a result, to order the legal mortgage registered in the land register in favour of the co-owners entitled to payment struck off.
Although the obligation to pay the sultă was registered in the land register, the creditors never sought its enforcement within the time limit set by law.
What the court found
The court held that the right to enforce a claim established by a court ruling is subject to the limitation period set out in Article 706 of the Code of Civil Procedure.
In this case, the creditors took no steps to enforce their right for more than three years from the date the ruling became final.
As a result, the court found that the right to seek enforcement of the sultă had become time-barred.
What happens to the legal mortgage?
A particularly important aspect of the ruling concerns the effect of limitation on the security registered in the land register.
The court held that, once the right to enforce the secured claim is extinguished, the conditions for striking the legal mortgage registered in favour of the creditors are met. As a result, alongside declaring the claim time-barred, the court also ordered the mortgage struck from the land register.
Why this ruling matters
In practice there are many situations where, after a partition of an inheritance or of jointly-owned assets, old charges remain registered in the land register even though the creditors never pursued recovery of the amounts owed.
A careful review of the legal situation can reveal cases where the right to enforce has become time-barred, allowing the property owner to seek removal of the charges encumbering the land register.