How is jointly owned property in Malta treated when one owner dies?

The outcome depends significantly on the specific legal basis on which the property was jointly held. Under the Civil Code, Chapter 16 of the Laws of Malta, ordinary co-ownership between two people, such as siblings holding a property together in defined shares, generally does not include an automatic right of survivorship, meaning the deceased co-owner's specific share generally becomes part of their own estate and passes to their own legal heirs according to their will or intestate succession rules, rather than automatically transferring in full to the surviving sibling co-owner simply because they jointly owned the property together. This is an important distinction from the community of acquests regime that applies between spouses, which operates under different principles regarding jointly accumulated marital property. Given that the surviving sibling and the deceased's own heirs may now hold the property together as co-owners in potentially different proportions, and given the genuine complexity in correctly determining exactly how the deceased's specific share should be valued and distributed among their own heirs, this is a situation where a notary and lawyer should properly review the original ownership documentation to confirm the precise legal basis of the co-ownership before proceeding with the estate administration.