 The dangers of the law being applied too late
The dangers of the law being applied too late
Several British newspapers, including the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, yesterday had stories claiming that hundreds of British families living in Spain could see their homes bulldozed.
It would be good if we could call such items ‘scare stories’, but it appears that, for now at least, we can’t.
The town of Catral, near Alicante, is at the centre of the latest scandal of illegally built property. Here we are looking at 1,200 homes which have gone up over the past few years on land close to or in a nature park, with many of them purchased by Brits or other foreigners.
The Malaya case in Marbella has opened a hornets’ nest of irregularities across the country, but especially along Spain’s coasts where the local town halls have seen the income from building licences as the ideal way for them to generate income.
The local elections are in May next year, but already the corruption allegations are being heard flying between the two main parties, the Socialists and the Partido Popular.
In the case of Catral the local town hall is Socialist, and therefore ideal prey for the Regional Valencia Government which is PP controlled. They say they will remove the town planning decisions from the local town hall, just as the Junta de Andalucía have been first to do in Marbella.
In Marbella, the Management Committee now running the town has said it will do what it can to make such illegal buildings legal in the future. This can bring some comfort to misled purchasers who are fearful of losing their homes.
In Catral however the regional government is talking about fining the builders and promoters involved, and using the money raised to compensate those who have purchased the property.
In both cases it is a worrying time for many foreign property owners, and local and regional planners must take care not to act in such a way that yesterday’s headlines in the foreign press become a regular feature and the Britons and others, take their money and investment elsewhere. A real estate crash remains a real possibility at this time.
Also the regional administrations should not give favoured treatment to local councils of their own political colour. That appears to be happening in Valencia, where, as yet, the regional government has not acted against the PP town hall in Orihuela, where more than 30,000 irregularly built houses are alleged to have been built – far more than in Catral.
Central Government has already established a network of special prosecutors whose brief is to track down and identify such real estate irregularities, but as more and more cases come to light more serious thought must be given as to how best deal with them, and the effect on the lives of those people implicated within them. | 
