185 Million Euros in off plan deposits lost on just five developments. Want to add yours?

Hi sarah

once again it proves just how wrong the Spanish justice system is when you can win your case but because your money isn't  protected by a reliable guarantee that's paid out on default, the win in court amounts to nothing, yet still the lawyers, the judges and everyone else involved in your case will get their money!.  Just how much longer will this daylight robbery by the Spanish system go on before common sense regulation will prevent it???

Hi sarahjustin,

Yes I believe that Rambi would be interested in collating your figures, unfortunately he is presently indisposed with Bronchitis, in the meantime and just so that you can provide him with your estimated figures, can I suggest you include the following.......

The name of any Estate Agent involved ?

The name of the Builder/Developer ?

If you paid 30,000 euros deposit, do you believe that the other 11 properties that were sold, paid a similar amount ,  i.e this would total 360,000 euros ?    or on the other hand if the deposits were taken from the buyers of all the 44  houses,  this would then amount to 1,320,000 euros. 

Hi Rambi,

Hope you are recovering , and get well soon.

Hi folks,

I'm planning on updating the figures in the next day or so and I may have some interesting news. I am keen to get the 'body armour' on again and rejoin the fight.

Doctor said Bronchial Pnuemonia and wanted to hospitalise me. I had to promise him and my wife that I would not do anything till I was given the 'all clear'. I am seeing him tomorrow. I'm feeling much better and thank you for your good wishes.

Thanks to you all for keeping the thread alive and in better condition than its originator,

Cheers,

Rambi

Hi,

Well said.

You can add my £20K.

My solicitor, BCP, failed to check the money was tranferred to the account holding the bank guarantee, he just took the word of the developer, 3Molinos.  Unbelievable!!!

The developer goes bankrupt.  result - money still in Santander under the control of the receivers.

He says he's not negligent yet when I appointed him he gave me a booklet in which it states that care should be taken to ensure the money is transferred and a copy of the bank transfer obtained.

I won't even go on holiday to that country any more.  They've got enough of my money!!!

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your support although I think you may have missed my point.

What I am trying to do is an impossible task. I am trying to get a 'feel' for the total amount of money that has been stolen from us by the developers/banks.

With a limited audience that any forum provides collecting individual amounts will take forever and will not produce any real impact.

But if you were able to estimate to the best of your knowledge the total amount lost by everyone on your development then we start to get some explosive stuff. For example if you said that 50% of the 2,000 properties on offer at your development were sold off plan, at a minimum deposit of 20,000 € each then 1,000 properties X 20,000 € = 20,000,000 €. Now you can see where we are going.

Obviously many people have no idea how many properties were sold off plan but some, like myself had a pretty good idea maybe because they were told by the agent, the developer or the media etc.

The current figure is around 600,000,000 € on just 19 developments. Now that has been reasonably conservatively estimated as far as it is possible. It has not taken into account deposits that were larger than the minimum, or any stage payments paid over the minimum deposit. Also I am never going to find all the developments in the whole of Spain. So I can afford to be a few million out.

However lets stay conservative. 19 sites responsible for six hundred million €'s  Say 3,000,000 € per site. Lets also say that there are 1,000 unfinished developments across Spain. Very conservative if you consider that 'eye on spain' has 4,500 Community threads open. So, stick with it, 3,000,000 € X 1,000 sites gives us a three and nine noughts. 3 Billion Euro's that has been stolen by Spain from its UK friends and neighbours in the EU.

That sort of number puts our situation into some kind of perspective and will generate more publicity than me stark naked marching up and down Downing Street with a placard.

Sorry Peter this was never meant to be a lecture, it's for the rest of the folks as well.

I wish you well and good luck and if you can help with the figures, thanks. Keep watching this thread for updates.

Regards,

Rambi.

Another development not mentioned is the 'Fortuna Golf Resort' situated 18 km's north east of Murcia, which was due for completion back in 2008.

It was meant to consist of a selection of apartments, townhouses, quad-houses and villas, set around or close to an 18 hole championship golf course, designed by the late Spanish golfing legend, Seve Ballesteros.

A luxury 4 star hotel was also to be included in the development, together with a golf range, a commercial centre with bars, restaurants and shops.

My 3 bed quad-house was going for 169,000 euros, of which I put down 53,000 euros deposit.

I have no idea how many others put down deposits for this development, or how many properties were for sale, but it was a BIG one.

Another site that failed, to add to the sorry long list. And yes, I have taken legal action in an attempt to get my money back. Still waiting.

It's about to be added. Thanks

Regards'

Rambi

Jerry,Did you know that the deveoloper at fortuna golf did not even own the land,your lawyor can check with the relivant town hall,good luck with your litigation.

Regards Mega

MISSING MILLIONS Latest results 28 July 2011

Thanks Mega for you support, and no I didn't know, although I can put my hand on my heart and say that I am hardly surprised.

I have passed the information to my Lawyer, who I am pretty sure is well on top of this, however, I do feel pessimistic about the whole thing.

kind regards, Jerry.

Not surprisingly there has not been as much movement as I was hoping for. But things are bound to slow down. I have also had to remove one large set of figures because they were duplicated.

Please try and make sure you give me the correct details .I'm sorry but I do not have an encyclopeadic knowledge of Spain or the language. Also try not to talk in code. To me ABB could mean Accrington Brass Band. Not everyone knows your site, your development, your part of the world, or your problems.  I have a very sketchy idea where places are so please give me as much correct information as you can.

Sorry about the listings, they looked fine before I tried pasting them in. Maybe someone can give me some jargon free tips. It's most frustrating to spend ages making it look good and then it turns out to be a dog's breakfast.

Regards,

Rambi

Dear All,

We are also taking legal action to try and recover our deposit in connection with the Fortuna Hills development in Murcia  Our developer Eurohouse 2010 have gone into administration and our lawyer believes our best course of action is against the bank to try and recover our deposit 51,000 Euro's.

We purchased through Atlas International who promised on a number of ocassions that they would also guarentee our funds.  However, this promise has also proved to be worthless and they have gone back on their word. 

In August 2010 Tony Hetherington published an article in the Mail on Sunday regarding our situation.  You can still google this by searching Tony Hetherington Spanish "definitely maybe" guarantee.
 

Is it worth contacting Tony Hetherinton to see if he can run a follow up story based on the data that you have compiled? 

Hi johnny 6.

Thanks for the posting and suggestion. I feel we are getting better at being organised and getting our message across to the media.

We get the occassional bit of success from various newspapers through 'Keith', 'Ruth' and others, and their protests and petitions, and some sterling work has been done by 'Michael' to get on to ITV's 'Homes from Hell'. Sadly the episode he was a large part of and which was set for transmission in this series has been shelved. However it is good to hear them starting to mention, at long last, the issue of bank guarantees.

My feeling is we have to hit 'em harder. If we all go in with our individual stories or even in our groups we will get reports of just thousands of euros lost by British buyers of Spanish properties, again. It's all been done too many times.

In time news editors will no longer run these stories as they are no longer newsworthy. There are quite a few members of the general public who have little sympathy with us. We also run the risk of  being perceived as being not very bright and it must be our own faults. Worse than that is the assumption that  we are 'rich bastards' trying to make a quick buck and serves us right if our fingers get burned.

That is why I'm trying to collect the figures that Spain does not want anyone to know. The true figures are in the Billions of euros, not the Millions, and that is newsworthy. I am in touch with some media people and am trying to build enough evidence for a really heavyweight TV programme like 'Panorama' or 'Dispatches' but it all takes evidence and that takes time, but we are getting there.

Firing individual bullets might get some results but what I'm trying to do is collect all the gunpowder from all the individual bullets and making it into one large bomb that will be seen, heard and felt by people who didn't even know we were fighting.

Thanks for the suggestion johnny6, I've read the article and I think you could be right. I'm sure there are many journalists out there who would be interested in the figures and data I am collecting and I shall certainly add Tony Hetherington to my list of likely suspects. But for now with so much 'newsworthy' stuff about I have to keep my powder dry as I will only have one bomb to set off and I want to make sure it will be in the right place at the right time for the best impact. What we must do is to hold our fire till the time is right.

If you have any idea of the size of your development and a fair estimate of how many people lost their deposits. We might be able to add this one to the listing and add a few more million euros to the half a billion plus already there.

Thanks for your help and suggestion,

Regards,

Rambi.

Hi Rambi, I have a few Action Groups going and I could say I could add about another 3 Million or so to your list of 'lost deposits' in Spain. How do I go about doing this in case you want this adding.

I have just been made aware of your thread.

I have been in touch with both Keith and Ruth in the recent past and I think a list like this will help both of them in their work

Peter

HI King of Spain 999 or do I call you your majesty?

Thanks for contacting me and for your kind words. All donations gratefully received. Particularly at present because things have slowed down considerably. Only to be expected as any forum has a limited number of active groups.

I do find this site somewhat difficult to master at times there seem to be so many different threads in so many different directions. I think the only way to keep up is to watch all new posts every day and that's not always possible.

In order to get figures added to my listing I am looking for a reasonable guess at the total amount of money lost on a development. Individual amounts do not make for impressive figures.

In my own case I discovered that 2,000 of the 3,000 homes being offered off plan had been sold. As the properties were all the same style and the minimum deposit was 30,000 euros each it was a simple matter to arrive at 60,000,000 euros.

If you are able to make a similar calculation we can add it to the list. There is never going to be an accurate figure and I don't take into account any larger deposits or stage payments post deposit. Also I am never going to find all the developments across Spain, and when I asked the Spanish statistical office they had no idea either.

So my estimates are going to be woefully small. But as the figures are coming in it appears that on average each site, large and small is around 30 million euros a site. I would love to know how many unfinished sites there are right across Spain but at these figures if it were just 500 sites we are looking at 15 Billion euros stolen by the banks and developers. Now that makes news.

It is worth remembering that eye on spain has 4,500 development sites on this website, so I would guess that even though my figure is small it  can't be considered as 'a few' as the authorities are claiming.

Regards,

Rambi.

Rambi, call me Pete for short an let's keep it informal!

I thought 'my' developments were large but yours sound huge.

There is one developer with two sites taking 80 deposits of average 60k Euros = 5 Million Say

There is another site that I don't have the full investor list for or numbe of units but lets estimate 300 units (I am in touch with 100 people on there). Average say 20,000 Euros = 6 Million.

Call the first development Los Cerros / La Cadima by Citrus

Call the second devlepment Terque by Inroal

Hope that is fine for you.

Peter

OK Pete,

If you scroll down this thread you will see the sizes of the developments on my latest listing (28th July). The largest looks like it is responsible for a loss to buyers of around 100 million euros, with an average deposit of 50,000 euros and 2,500 properties.

There are some so big that I can't find anyone who can even hazard a guess at the size of the problem. Polaris world for example. But I know in my gut that there are more but once they get so big no one can put a figure on them.

Anyway we are getting there. Just to keep my records straight and to avoid duplication can you let me have the following for each site.

The name of the development, the area, the region, Average deposit, No. of properties, the developer, the agent, and the final figure. Those in Blue are not essential but extra information like the year that deposits were first put down and whether or not bank guarantees were issued is all useful for building a picture that I can possibly use.

Regards,

Rambi

OK here is the information for the name of the development, the area, the region, Average deposit, No. of properties, the developer, the agent, and the final figure. There are some other related developments with same developers and agents but I don't have enough details right now to give to you. So let's just go with these for now and we can add rest later as and when I get the information.

Regards,

Peter

Wow Pete,

Very comprehensive. Thanks

Regards,

Rambi