Cayey Sugar Co. v. Registrar of Guayama
Cayey Sugar Co. v. Registrar of Guayama
Opinion of the Court
delivered the opinion of the court.
The instrument having been presented in the Registry of Property of G-uayama, the registrar refused to admit the same to record for the reasons stated in his decision of April 25, 1918, as follows:
“The foregoing instrument is refused admission to record and a cautionary notice is entered instead for the legal period in favor of the Cayey Sugar Company on the reverse side of page 78 of Volume 2, C. A. of Cayey, property No. 78, duplicate, entry letter C, for the following reasons: First, because real property belonging to the conjugal partnership is affected by the contract for an agricultural loan and the milling of sugar cane and the express consent of the wife is necessary to validate the same, according to section 159 of the Civil Code and the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Porto Rico; second, because the Mortgage Law requires that in order to create a servitude or a lien on real property, the title shall be set out in a public instrument, and it is obvious that an affidavit is not equivalent to a public instrument. 22 P. R. R. 117. Also, the curable defects are assigned of failure to state the area of the property and to show according to law the authority of Mateo Rueabado to contract for the Cayey Sugar Company.”
The property affected by the contract consists of thirty-two acres of land situated in Vegas ward of the district of Cayey and its boundaries are stated in the deed, the owner of the property being Luis J. Ortiz y Utset, whose wife, Dolores Meléndez y Muñoz, was not a party to the instrument.
Among other conditions agreed upon in the contract, Ortiz Utset bound himself to plant, cultivate, and keep in good condition at least twenty-five acres of sugar cane during the-
The appellant corporation alleges that the contract in question is of a personal or purely administrative character and that therefore the participation of the wife in its execution is not necessary. It further alleges that the area of the property is stated in the contract.
Th'e question of law raised in the first allegation has been decided already by this court in the case of Fajardo Sugar Company v. Registrar of Humacao, 25 P. R. R. 176. According to law, the consent of the wife in a case like the present, in which the ganancial character of the property is not questioned, is necessary.
As to the curable defect of failure to state the area of the property, while it is true that the instrument sets out that the said property is a parcel of thirty-two acres of land, it does not give the equivalent of that area in the decimal metric system.
As the appellant does not assail in his brief the other grounds of the decision appealed from, we abstain from considering them. The registrar states in his brief that if the first defect assigned had not existed in the contract he would have recorded it in so far as it referred to the agricultural loan.
For the foregoing reasons the decision of the Eegistrar of Property of Gluayama must be
Affirmed.
Case-law data current through December 31, 2025. Source: CourtListener bulk data.