Why the Spanish mayors made property millions...

It may not be much consolation to the many ex-pats who have finished up owning illegal property in Spain, but the main cause of their predicament has now been identified…

The finger points in the direction of the country’s town halls and the all-prevailing local mayors, who came to rely on getting essential funds by doing deals with the construction sector.

This is legal under Spain’s local government laws that link much central funding with the necessity to raise each authority’s population and thereby gain extra cash from Madrid.

Easy deals with house-builders brought millions of Euros into the town halls and, as new “residents” were acquired, so too was the resultant extra funding from central government. Some mayors and their planning chiefs who took the cash for themselves have been sent to jail, but other towns and villages remain in limbo while the mess is sorted out.

It needs new legislation to centralise local government funding and remove the need for ambitious town halls to raise their own extra cash. Local planning can be retained, but with more regional approvals required on bigger, high impact schemes.

Meanwhile, as there is no central source of developments with problems, a quick browse of www.eyeonspain.com will show where the buyers are unhappy with building progress, planning consents, lost deposits or other problems. There is a useful alphabetical list of developments, so any that tempt can be checked out quickly.

Most developments are, of course, fully legal and the Spanish lawyers of would-be buyers can produce all the evidence needed to make a buying decision while there are real bargains around.