Spanish Developer Used Bogus Certificates to Win Court Cases
The title is very unsettling and surely, libel action material by anyone’s standards. But sadly, it is exactly what is being done by Inmobiliaria Peñarroya, developer for La Reserva de Marbella, to uphold the legality of these properties in courts.
The story, in short, involves licenses of first occupancy issued by administrative silence that were granted, supposedly and according to Peñarroya, for a number of buildings completed at La Reserva de Marbella. These licenses were granted by Leopoldo Barrantes Conde, currently indicted in the Malaya Operation, on behalf of the Marbella Town Hall, and the certificates are there to prove it.
However, my colleague Luis got suspicious because these certificates lacked the classic stamp issued by the documentation registrar of any Town Hall to evidence the date of notification of the administrative act. So we wrote to the Town Hall to enquire whether these certificates were actually part of the file stored with the Planning Department ,and, to our surprise, we were advised they were not, there is simply no trace of the original document supporting the photocopies in file.
The seriousness of this situation is shocking: already, the Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the developer on the basis of these fraudulent ghost licenses, perpetuating this deliberate legal anomaly based on fake official document.
Mr. Barrantes issued the licenses on the 16th of December 2005 and was arrested on the 29th of March 2006.
In our opinion, one of the following has happened:
- The documents have been drawn up for the occasion, using Photo Shop or another less sophisticated method, leaving the registrar stamp out.
- The documents were, at some point, officially issued by the Town Hall but the originals were removed by someone, either before or after the arrest of Mr. Barrantes.
- The originals existed but have been carelessly lost, or inadvertently misplaced…
Whichever the case, the use of the documents by La Reserva de Marbella constitutes “procedural swindle” (estafa procesal), an action entailing deliberately deceiving a Judge or court into issuing a ruling that would have not been otherwise reached.
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