Anyone who has dealt with Manilva Costa S.A. (developer of Manilva Gardens) will know what I am writing about. The elusiveness of this company in respect to their accountability for contracts Ocean View Properties signed, supposedly on Manilva Costa‘s behalf, with mostly British buyers, has forced lawyers to be more creative and find ways to pursue the refund of their deposits for contractual default.

Mates, the developer’s lawyer, has been well instructed on how to deal with private purchase contract signatories to avoid being held responsible for non-delivery of the units on time. The story can be summarized in the following points:

1. Property buyers looking for investment opportunities on the Costa del Sol were approached by Ocean View Properties, or viceversa, with an offer or few developments owned by Manilva Costa S.A.
2. Once the buyers were convinced that the investments was sound they went on to transfer a fat deposit to OVP which would in turn send them two copies of the contracts, unsigned, for them to sign and send back. OVP rarely signed the contract although they did acknowledge the receipt of the deposit.
3. According to Manilva Costa the deposits where never sent to them and according to OVP they were sent (?). OVP, after gathering millions of pounds in deposits for property and a number of vicissitudes, including unconfirmed claims that the owner had died on an airplane crash in Brazil, went on to file bankruptcy.
4. Buyers stuck with private purchase contracts signed with Ocean View Properties looked to pursue Manilva Costa for the deposits but found an unsurpassable legal impediment: there were no contracts signed by Manilva Costa and neither acknowledgement of having received the deposits from OVP.
5. In one occasion we sent a legal notice to Manilva Costa S.A. with a request to confirmed having received the deposit of a client they wrote back positively, thus paving the way for a legal claim in Spain.
6. Manilva Costa Directors quickly realized that they had to stop this and instructed lawyers to deny having received any such deposits. Strangely enough Mates had the details of all buyers and offered them to complete on their properties for the initially agreed prices minus the deposits, even though the denied having received them. To this date Mates is eager to convince clients to close at the original price minus 30% of the purchase price (approximately the value of the deposits).

After meeting with several buyers stuck with this situation we proposed them to file a claim at the Bristol County Court against both Ocean View Properties and Manilva Costa and needless to say, neither of them appeared in Court to contest them. The case was heard and District Judge Britton acceded to the claimants petitions in full. With this Court ruling, which we legalized and translated to use in Spain, we filed for execution thereof in the Court in Seville and requested that a legal charge was taken out against Manilva Costa to ensure that enough funds were available in the likely event the Seville judge ruled in our favour.

We now expect other claimants to follow suit and not allow Manilva Costa to get away with using carefully planned obfuscation to deter their own bona fide clients from demanding justice to be served. After all, as said before, Europe is now a large country where nobody should be able to find legal shelter after deceiving consumers.

Promaga/Vista Hermosa, Hercesa Dona Julia, Altos de Alcaucin and Arrohabitatge/Don Juan are some of the developers/developments which, having read a recent article published on the Daily Telegraph titled Buy-to-let investors backing out of off-plan deals face court action, are now avidly typing their lawsuits. The article goes on to say:

UK Buy-to-let investors reneging on off-plan property purchase contracts need to be aware that they risk losing more than just their deposits, warns City law firm Wedlake Bell. It said “hundreds of buy-to-let investors have already been pursued through the courts for trying to wriggle out of off-plan contracts’”.

Developers have 2 options if they want to cause concern to their (still) clients:

1. Option 1: they can file a suit in their countries of origin through the local Courts as the address on the contract is normally their home address.
2. Option 2: they can file a suit in Spain in accordance to the jurisdiction clause (which invariably says Spanish Courts are competent) and request that the suit in notified in the Uk, or if the address for notification is their lawyers’ address, have defendants summoned through the former. A favourable Court sentence can then be enforced in the UK.

It may sound as if I wanted to take sides and encourage these horrible developers, as some want to put them, to take away the sleep from Spanish off-plan property buyers, but far from this it is a warning that these things happen here as they are already happening in Britain and presumably an various other countries. It is therefore not something exclusive to Spain as in fact Council Regulation (EC) No 44/2001 of 22 December 2000 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters is applicable to all the UE and is now being used with success by claimants all over Europe.

On my next post I will explain how we are using this EU regulation in an interesting (and reverse) case against OceanView Properties and Manilva Costa S.A.. Our client sued these 2 companies for contractual default in the purchase of a property in a development known as Gardens of Manilva and won the case. We are now enforcing the sentence in Seville, where the developer is based, and are not expecting any disruptions in the process of having it accepted and upheld as, after all, Europe is now a one big country!