Spanish Boiler Rooms Dealt With By the FSA
It is a measure of how Britain deals with those lawyers that go astray: the BBC reported, back in May 2010, that a lawyer and his firm had been fined £400,000 and banned for life from the financial services industry for helping bogus share-selling boiler rooms based in Spain. The disciplinary action document was published on the FSA website.
This is in stark contrast with the impunity of some Spanish lawyers based in Malaga that still today act for fraud-recovery boiler rooms (I would like to think that unknowingly), lending their names and registration details with the Law Society so that these so-called firms can deluge the United Kingdom, and other EU countries, with thousands of telephone calls, pretending to be genuine lawyers that can recover losses sustained previously by the recipients of the calls, either on failed property investments or to other fraudsters.
Ramirez and Ramirez, run by Fabian Marcelo Ramirez, is probably the leading bogus law firm on the Costa del Sol, and sits comfortably at the top of a myriad of “recovery rooms” that are costing millions to British citizens, mostly. Mr. Ramirez has even the cheek of suing me, criminally, for divulging defamatory comments that “harm his reputation, and that of his professional firm, on the Costa del Sol”, when it is objectively true that he fronted two previous companies, “Fuengirola Servicios 2002” and “Key Property Town Advisory”, accused of massive timeshare fraud and for which he had been arrested, and that he targets hundreds by cold-calling them offering legal services.
The particular modus operandi of Mr. Ramirez consists now on filing police reports, or “denuncias”, against other bogus operators, attempting to create confusion by diverting the attention of the investigators at the Spanish National Police, all the while projecting an appearance of legitimacy to his activities. Needless to say, real lawyers are never appointed (their names are used though, just as Atlantic law did), powers of attorney are yet to be seen and, of course, monies are never recovered.
How desirable would it not be that the Spanish authorities clamped down on these individuals, once and for all? Very much so, but patience: serious judicial and police measures are on their way, in particular after yet another new “company” has set up to do exactly the same: “Bratley and Sharp”.
90% of all job postings in Fuengirola have to do with this ‘industry’. Just check the classifieds section in the local newspapers and you will see what I mean.