SUTTON PLACE

Recent news affecting co-op / condo buyers, sellers, boards and residents. This week, one of the city's biggest landlords enacts one of the largest smoking bans in the country, with reverberations for co-ops and condos. A shareholder sues a co-op board over a newly blocked view. A veterans' loan-guarantee program, common throughout the country, gets no respect in New York. And married co-op and condo owners are taking in roommates,

Theodore Xenakis bought shares of 50 Sutton Place South Owners Corp. and was the proprietary lessee of Apartment 6J. In August 1980, he purported to transfer the shares and assign the lease to Cia. Naviera Financiera Aries, a Panamanian corporation. Xenakis never told that co-op board he had transferred the shares and lease.

The case of the careless care dogs is moving forward — just without the board members.

In a New York Supreme Court decision filed Dec. 2 with the County Clerk, Judge Emily Jane Goodman ruled that a lawsuit by writer Liz Weston (not to be confused with the financial columnist Liz Pulliam Weston) against the tony co-op 14 Sutton Place South (above) could continue toward trial. But Goodman cut loose the seven board-members themselves, saying they were protected by the Business Judgment Rule.

So will Theo and Kodi have to keep using the service elevator? And how's Lola's injured tail doing?

... a co-op board appears to renege on staff promises that new buyers can install a washer, a frustrated mom sues to evict her 58-year-old son from a Sutton Place co-op, and read what some deluded sellers are asking for their apartments.