Spanish Equity Release Fiasco

As we know, some of the “Equity Releasers” were utilizing the insurance wrapper to cajole otherwise debt-free property owners to release the largest possible chunk of their wealth and give it to irresponsible banks so that they could mitigate the taxes (Inheritance and Wealth) and with clever “banking”, get a monthly salary, etc. Rothschild, Danske Bank, Landsbanki and Nordea, among others, used the Unit-Linked/Capital Assurance to tell the tale that those funds would be under the radar of the Spanish taxman, as Nordea put it, “Keeping it in the family – efficient tax planning”. But, since as early as 1999, the Spanish Tax Office had already plans for these schemes…when specifically stating that Inheritance Tax would apply in full, by repeating insistently, literally, that:

“ where policy holder and beneficiary are different, the amounts derived from the insurance will be subject to IHT in Spain”

I would also throw in article 18 of the Spanish Inheritance Tax 1999 Regulation which states that, in the event of non-residents for tax purposes (referring to the inheritors), the amounts derived from life insurance contracts will be taxed in Spain where the contracts were signed with Spanish insurance companies or signed in Spain with foreign insurance companies that operated in Spain.

Are these schemes therefore not a deliberate tax-defrauding deception designed to release precious equity that, thereafter and in the best of cases, got lost due to irresponsible management and in the worst, misappropriated?

Documents

The following documents are binding enquiries (consultas vinculantes) answered by the tax office proving the above. Please note they are in Spanish:

• Equity-Release-DGT-V0068-99-de-30-junio-1999.-DGTrib (PDF ~25Kb)
• Equity-Release–Cons.DGT-242003-de-4-marzo-2003.DGTrib (PDF ~25Kb)
• Equity-Release-DGT-32001-de-26-febrero-2001 (PDF ~25Kb)
• Equity-Release-Cons.DGT-192003-de-5-febrero-2003.DGTrib (PDF ~25Kb)

admin Uncategorized Danske Bank, Danske Bank Capital Assurance, inheritance tax, Landsbanki, Nordea, Rothschild

Landsbanki has had no qualms over introducing false information on a public deed of mortgage loan, signed in front of a Government appointed Spanish Notary Public. In this instance, the spurious claim was that my clients had been in Luxembourg, on the 20th of February 2026, to sign a contract…

I can live with the 2026 error, unless Landsbanki had a time-machine which nobody knows about (now probably auctioned off to some freak by the bankrupcy administrators), but stating that the signatories to the contract had been in Luxembourg to sign what is an unintelligible contract bodes well for successful Court action, given the utter lack of ethics and moral integrity.

Antonio Flores Uncategorized Equity Release, Icelandic Bank, Landsbanki