Paris Court Orders Moroccan Apartment Seller to Return €5,000 Deposit
A man paid 5,000 euros to buy an apartment in Morocco, then abandoned his plans. The owner refused to return the money. After nearly three years of disagreement, the Paris Judicial Court has ruled in the buyer’s favor.
The apartment was never sold. But the 5,000 euros paid by the buyer remained in the owner’s pocket. She believed she was entitled to keep the money because she had taken the property off the market. The Paris Judicial Court has now rejected that argument.
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The case dates back to October 20, 2023. Before a Moroccan notary, a man signed a preliminary agreement to buy a co-owned apartment for 1.35 million dirhams. That same day, he transferred 5,000 euros to the seller, with the payment marked “Apartment purchase deposit.”
The contract gave him until November 20 to pay the full price. But the payment was never made, and the sale was abandoned. The two parties then signed a termination agreement at the notary’s office.
The owner nevertheless refused to return the 5,000 euros. She argued that the money was payment for granting the buyer exclusivity, even though he ultimately backed out of the deal.
A contract clause turns the case around
In court, the seller first tried to have the French court decline jurisdiction. Since the apartment is in Morocco, she argued, the dispute should be heard by a Moroccan judge.
But the Paris judges disagreed. The case concerns not ownership of the property, but the return of a sum of money. Since both parties live in France, the court ruled that it had jurisdiction.
What made the difference was chiefly the wording of the notarized documents. The preliminary agreement stipulated that if the price was not paid by the deadline, the owner would regain free use of the property, without compensation for having taken it off the market. The termination agreement also ruled out any compensation payable by the buyer.
Keeping the 5,000 euros would therefore amount to indirectly imposing a penalty on him that both parties had expressly excluded, the judges explained in their ruling of September 23, 2026.
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The owner was ordered to return the 5,000 euros, plus 500 euros in legal costs and court costs. The ruling is provisionally enforceable.
However, the buyer was not awarded the additional 1,000 euros in damages he had sought. The court found that he had not shown that the seller had acted abusively in a way that caused him separate harm.
