Section 14 of the Retail Tenancies Act 1986 (Vic) does not exclude the operation of the doctrine of surrender of a lease by operation of law; the doctrine operates contemporaneously with the Act. A party in breach of an essential term of a lease (such as a time-of-the-essence rent payment clause) or whose breach is repudiatory in nature cannot accept the other party's repudiation of the lease. The knowledge of individual corporate officers and agents cannot be simply aggregated to create a notional person with dishonest intent for the purposes of establishing fraud.
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