MARBELLA PROPERTY IMPASSE: PROGRESS AT LAST?

News

Michael Coy / 2009-11-29 14:26:26

July 2009: the Marbella council approves the PGOU

The moment desperately awaited by 48,000 property owners in Marbella may have arrived. After years of delay, it looks like they will be allowed to regard their “paralysed” homes as truly their own.

It has been a long time coming. However, it now seems that the Marbella PGOU may finally be coming into force. Thousands of home owners, most of them British, may soon be able to call their Marbella homes their own – and there is a guarantee from the mayoress that no-one will have to pay the 12,000-euro “regularization charge”.

In the wake of a rash of property scandals across southern Spain in the 1990’s, it is now compulsory for each local authority to formulate its own “PGOU” (“Plan General de Ordenacion Urbana”), a town-planning by-law which fixes permanently which land can be built on, and which areas must be set aside for other uses.

The problem for many British people living in Marbella (and Germans, Swedes and Dutch residents, too) is that they bought their apartments and villas in good faith, but politicians, developers and lawyers were dishonestly conspiring to sell properties erected on land which was never meant for residential use. These innocent purchasers have had their homes “paralyzed” for years.

A paralyzing order issued by a Spanish court acts rather like an injunction. The owners cannot sell their property, improve it or borrow money against it, until the court resolves the underlying legal issues, and “frees” it.

Marbella has been a “black hole” of corruption for the best part of 20 years. Local politicians have been mired in a bribe culture, by means of which they received generous “back-handers” in return for granting planning permission to developers in respect of land which should never have been built on. Blameless foreign purchasers came along, bought the flats and villas in good faith, and now find that they are stuck with homes which they are not allowed to sell.

In the final days of 2005, a massive police operation uncovered corruption in Marbella City Hall on a scale that almost defies belief. Politicians, lawyers – even police chiefs – were “on the take” to the tune of tens of millions of euros. Scores of alleged fraudsters, many of them former pillars of Marbella society, are currently awaiting trial.

In the wake of this clean sweep, a new council has made slow progress in putting together a PGOU which will regularize the status of homes purchased in good faith. The Plan was finally passed by Marbella’s councillors last July, but further delays have been incurred.

The Junta de Andalucia (the regional governing body) is supervising Marbella closely, and has to “sign off” on every decision made by the city council. A legal limitation on the PGOU process means that it must pass into law before the end of 2009, and after considerable bickering between Marbella City Hall and the Junta, in which each has blamed the other for the delays, it now seems that the PGOU will be ratified in time.

In a further encouraging development, Doña Angeles Muñoz, the conservative Mayoress of Marbella, has succeeded in adding a clause to the PGOU legislation which will exempt all those who bought their homes in good faith from the 12,000-euro charge which was scheduled to be imposed on every property to be “regularized”.

Home-owners in Marbella can now look forward to the New Year in the virtual certainty that their properties will be freed of all legal encumbrances. Our readers can rest assured that we will be monitoring these events and will report on any development as it happens.