Short answer. Yes. Under Article 2148, an officious manager is liable even for a fortuitous loss if, by his intervention, he prevented a more competent person from taking up the management. The exception is where he acted to save the property or business from imminent danger, which the law will not discourage.
What the law says
If by his intervention he prevented a more competent person from taking up the management
Civil Code, Article 2148 — Further Fortuitous-Event Liability. Read the full provision →
What the law says
Except when the management was assumed to save property or business from imminent danger
Civil Code, Article 2148 — Further Fortuitous-Event Liability. Read the full provision →
Crowding out a better manager forfeits the excuse
A fortuitous event ordinarily frees anyone from liability for the resulting loss. Article 2148 denies that relief to an officious manager in a second situation: if by his intervention he prevented a more competent person from taking up the management. The mischief is not that he managed badly, but that his stepping in kept someone abler out. Had he stood aside, a more capable person would have taken charge and the property might have weathered the event. The law lays the accidental loss at the door of the one whose presence displaced that better outcome.
What this ground requires
Two things have to line up. There must have been a more competent person actually available and willing to take up the management — not a hypothetical better manager, but a real one within reach — and the officious manager's intervention must have prevented that person from stepping in. It is the act of shouldering aside a superior alternative that the ground punishes. Where no more competent person was on hand, or where such a person was never going to act anyway, this limb does not bite, however modest the intervening manager's own abilities may have been.
The imminent-danger carve-out
As with the rest of the article, the opening words control: except when the management was assumed to save property or business from imminent danger. Someone who acts in a genuine emergency to head off an imminent loss is not caught by this ground either. In a crisis there is rarely time to canvass who is best qualified, and the law would rather property be saved by whoever is present than lost while the ideal manager is sought. The rescuer's intervention is protected even if, in hindsight, a more competent person could have been found.
The prudent course
The lesson runs the opposite way from instinct. Good intentions do not licence pushing ahead when someone plainly better placed is ready to take over; outside an emergency, the officious manager's safer course is to defer to that person rather than insist on managing himself. If he presses on and an accident then destroys the property, he cannot fall back on the fortuity, because the law counts his having shut out the abler hand as the reason the loss landed where it did. Stepping back, in the ordinary case, is what keeps the fortuitous risk off him.