Property building illegal licenses and certificate

There were clouds in my coffee today. For some reason I awoke early and so I was the first into the kitchen to make a coffee this morning. As I entered the kitchen I was confronted with something I can only describe as a scene from the classic cult film With nail and I. (You know the scene I mean, where With nail goes into the kitchen to do the washing up but halts abruptly at the door to exclaim, ‘‘The entire sink’s gone rotten! I don’t know what’s in there!’’ after he sees all the filthy washing-up piled up high in the sink.)

It seems to me that maybe one of our newly-arrived house-sharing tenants hasn’t shared a house before and is therefore unaware of a certain unwritten basic social motto: ‘‘Please leave it as you found it (if not a bit cleaner).’’ Well, I left it as I found it (with the exception of a rather abruptly-worded message indelibly marked on the kitchen cupboard door hypothesizing on the offender’s just position on the evolutionary scale) and chose instead to visit a local café for a coffee.

Illegal licenses and certificate.

Whilst I was sipping on a far superior coffee than I could have made at home anyway, and silently cussing the unknown perpetrator of mi casa’s kitchen chaos, I started to read an article in the newspaper about hundreds of Brits who have bought new properties on the Costa del Sol, only to be prevented from legally moving into them due to some certificate from the developer enabling water and electricity to be connected not being forthcoming.

So they’ve taken them to court but the developer says that it’s the town hall’s fault, not theirs, because the town hall should have issued it automatically, so they’ve taken the town hall to court but the town hall says that the properties involved are illegal because they’re built on land protected from new development which is why they haven’t issued the certificate and are, in fact, considering demolishing them.

Meanwhile, the developers are suing the buyers for reneging on their contractual commitments, and the buyers are counter-suing the developers, claiming that it is they who have broken their contractual obligations by not providing the certificate – and we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of euros of hundreds of individual’s life-savings being lost here! And I’m moaning about a few dirty pots?

The news papers headlines.

How can anyone get themselves into that kind of position anyway, putting up their life’s savings without even the most basic of checks? So I thought that it might make for an interesting article, to find out how it all came about, and to discover who really is to blame for these pitiable people’s plights. After a bit of research, it wasn’t long before I was reading the “rumors” phrases like ‘‘the largest corruption racket discovered in the Spanish judicial system in 25 years’’ and ‘‘a multi-million euro international money-laundering scandal’’ and ‘‘foreign mafia gangs have a hold on Spain’’, and ‘‘impounded goods included 275 works of art by artists of immense prestige, 103 thoroughbred racehorses, luxury villas, 5 kilos of jewelry and a helicopter’’ That said, in the interests of self-preservation, I’ve decided that this month I’ll write about ‘‘Oranges’’ instead.

How could this happen?

There are scores of different kinds of oranges throughout Andalucía, many of which can be found in the neglected orange groves of properties recently bought by British homeowners at the beginning of their ‘‘dream-of- a-new-beginning-in-Spain’’ dream - a dream that quickly turned into a nightmarish ordeal when they discovered that the beautiful new villas and apartments that they’d just bought had been built illegally and were earmarked to be demolished by the town council. How could this be? It doesn’t happen in Britain, does it? In Britain, we would still employ a solicitor to do Land Registry searches and such like, even though it’s usually safe to assume that the building would have had full planning permission originally granted anyway.

Here in Spain, though, you can’t afford to make the same assumptions, especially when you realize that in Spain you buy a property under the doctrine of caveat emptor; which is basically solicitors’ verbally-camouflaged Latin-jargon meaning ‘‘Let the buyer beware’’. And beware you should. The onus is on you to check out anything the agent or vendor tells you - and if it turns out to be an outlandish pack of lies that ends up costing you everything you own, well sorry mate, but the law’s not here to protect the gullible. Didn’t you know you should use a notary to do your searches, not a lawyer? Never mind, eh? There are politicians with paintings to purchase.

Corrupt city officials.

So what’s going on? Who are buying all the paintings and the helicopters? Well, it’s not exactly a secret anymore that Spain has a small issue of construction corruption in certain corridors of power. For the last fifteen years, an average of 800,000 houses or flats has been built each year - a staggeringly huge number compared to other European countries.

Many of them have been hotels and holiday apartments built illegally with the connivance of corrupt city officials who take a back-hander from the developer to get planning permission for them, (even though they know the land is a nature reserve protected from developers, which is how come they bought it so cheap in the first place). And they then bribe a town councilor to rubber stamp the plans, sometimes even to the extent of reclassifying the land.

Corruption in whole Spain.

So what started off as a totally separate police investigation into money laundering and drug trafficking ended up with half of the Marbella city council in jail, Mayor of Estepona and many more towns. The investigation is still going on and the profits reaped by participators in this massive network of corruption are expected to be millions and millions of euros. And there’s talk of it being just the tip of the iceberg of something going on all over in Spain, not only in Marbella, Estepona, Benalmadena or Andalucia, it’s in whole Spain.

Ask always for the License of First Occupation.

Whilst Spain’s ruling elite has benefited from the construction boom and accrued massive profits, the man on the street is falling into debt and struggling to keep up with the cost of living. And Mr. and Mrs. Brit Homeowner are still waiting on their ‘‘Licencia de Primera Ocupció’’ or License of First Occupation. This is issued by the town hall after the new building has been checked to make sure that it is of the same spec as the original plans, for example, that there are only five floors as stated, not six as so often is the case. The license verifies that the building is located in a proper planning zone and it meets basic health and safety conditions, and to have one means that your new home has ‘‘been born into the legal world’’ so to speak.

It is also required by the amenities companies to connect gas, water and electricity supplies. In the past, even if the license wasn’t immediately forthcoming due to some irregularity or other, after three or four years it would usually be granted retrospectively. But not now. Not since all these construction irregularities and illegalities have come to light. And, as much as I kind of feel for these poor lambs to the slaughter, in the same heartbeat I think to myself ‘‘you won’t let that happen to you again, will you - even if you could?’’

Buyer has handled in good faith.

The thing is that, even though it’s apparently just the tip of the iceberg in Spain. There are a lot of people that crave power, going well beyond governments. There are some serious vultures and magpies out there. But the new Major in Marbella, Ángeles Muñoz Uriol, and her Partido Popular is working hard and has many good plans to sort up the problem for the entire property owner whit problem and she are protect the buyer who have trust the lawyer and developer paper.