Roodepoort frail care centre announces closure
Kruinpark has thrown in the towel in their ongoing rent dispute, and announced they will be closing their doors.
Kruinpark Frail Care Centre, situated at the Kruinpark Retirement Village in Umgeni Road, has announced that it will close its doors at the end of July.
This comes after protracted legal battles with the centre’s landlords over outstanding rent, and repairs and maintenance at the facility, which at one point serviced more than 70 full-time patients.
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According to frail care co-owner Cornelia Germishuizen, the dispute arose out of the landlord’s refusal to sign a lease agreement in the name of the holding company, Virlomax, which bought over the business from another company in 2019.
“The other company had a significant amount outstanding, and the landlords refused to entertain another lease until all outstanding amounts were paid up.”
Germishuizen adds that this was partly because the owner of the previous company also happened to be a shareholder in Virlomax at the time.
Rumours recently started spreading on social media platforms that residents and their families were told, with just a few weeks’ notice, that they should vacate by July 1.
“This is simply not true,” says Germishuizen. “We’ve been very open and honest from the outset with our residents and their families. They were fully aware that there were legal disputes going on, and what those disputes were.
“We tried everything we could to convince the landlord to give us a lease agreement, but they simply would not budge.
“We even offered to give up the business to another operator, so that our residents would not be affected, but they also rejected this.
“The ever-escalating costs of the ongoing legal disputes and the exorbitant rent left us with no choice but to vacate the premises,” says Germishuizen, who adds that even if they could somehow settle the legal disputes, the rent (currently at R305 000 per month) makes it impossible to run a profitable business.
Virlomax confirmed their closure in a letter addressed to residents and their families on June 20, but Germishuizen stresses that, though the letter was only officially sent on this date, they had communicated with patients long before this.
“We have already managed to place all our patients in different centres at the same cost,” she says.
“I drove to each centre and negotiated with the owners. We also have an arrangement in place with an ambulance service to transport the patients to the new centres at our cost.”
