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ARCHIVED - Brits scammed in El Valle del Sol property fraud in Spain to get justice 17 years later
The prosecutor in Murcia is asking for 6 years in prison for three developers accused of building houses on land in El Valle del Sol that did not belong to them
Three developers will be made to sit in the dock this week, accused of defrauding British citizens with the sale of homes in the El Valle del Sol urbanisation, in the Murcian district of Gea y Truyols 17 years ago.
The defendants built a residential development on rural land belonging to a third party without their express consent, and then allegedly committed fraud when it came to selling the properties to Brits between 2005 and 2006. They are accused of selling the homes as if they were separate plots of land when in fact they were not, since they were located on a large tract of land that belonged to another owner.
Even before the homes were sold, the real owner of the land had begun a legal battle against the promotors back in 2002. Finally, in 2006, a Murcia court recognised his right to recover the land even if he demolished what had been built on it.
Following that ruling, one of the defendants signed a settlement agreement with the owner whereby he transferred the ownership of the land in exchange for about one million euros. However, this sale never came to pass and the defendants never paid up. Instead, the land was automatically handed back to the original owner for free, but not before the separate plots had been sold to unwitting British buyers, who knew nothing of the contested ownership of the land they were ‘buying’.
In court this week, nine British couples will give testimony on how they “handed over the agreed price without being warned by the defendants, who acted in common agreement and with a motive to profit, that the land on which the works were built belonged to a third party”, according to the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Most of the purchasers were found in 2009 when the court agreed to enforce the judgment and hand over the properties. A court ordered, years later, that the owner of the land pay these Brits the value of the buildings or to sell the land to the British according to the value established by an expert.
The three men accused of orchestrating the scam are now facing a possible six years in prison each.
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