Prosecutor’s Office investigates the multi-million euro overcharge in the purchase of La Plaza

The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is looking into the claim that the Torrevieja City Council paid too much for the surface rights to the La Plasa building, which could have cost them millions of euros. The Public Prosecutor’s Office has asked the City Council for the files relating to this deal.

The Prosecutor’s Office starts an investigation after getting a complaint from the Torrevieja PSOE last September. The complaint, signed by spokesperson Bárbara Soler, says that the City Council bought the building’s surface rights for almost twice what it was worth at the time of the first appraisal, which was already much higher than the market value.

Close to twice as much

At the end of 2022, the PP-led city council, which is led by Mayor and Councillor for Urban Planning Eduardo Dolón, decided to buy 87% of the building’s surface rights from a construction company in the Vega Baja region for €3,919,715. The building opened in 1995 as a brand-new central market and shopping centre. This gives the owner the rights to about 40 tiny stores and shared spaces on the first, second and third floors of the building, which had been empty and abandoned for 20 years.

The business hired by the City Council to undertake the valuation said the property was worth 2,250,490 euros, which is over double what was paid. La Plasa was in the middle of the city and had an unlawful floor that had been ordered to be torn down since 1998 but had not been done.

The process started in the middle of December 2022, although most of the paperwork was done in just 48 hours, from December 29 to 30 of that year. At the time, the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) loudly opposed this deal, which gave them the surface rights to these empty commercial buildings.

The City Council supposedly used two appraisal reports for this: one from an independent outside company (Técnicos en Tasación SA) that put the total at 2,250,492 euros, which the group already thinks is too high given the plants’ condition and the fact that they couldn’t be legalised, and one from a municipal architect, who in a technical report that no one had formally requested and was added to the purchase file, raised it to 4,380,843 euros.

Something that belonged to him

In a strange way, the City Council got back something that had always been owned by the city. Up until the 1990s. Pedro Hernández Mateo led another local government, this time from the People’s Party (PP), which gave a businessman a 50-year surface rights lease on the property that used to be the central market. The historic Torrevieja market square, with its classic Mediterranean architecture, was destroyed. That agreement led to the creation of a huge commercial structure that never opened and whose floors have been empty for more than twenty years. The bottom level still included a few food vendors, which were the successors to the old market. These stalls were still open for business, and the municipality still owned them.

A deal

In the middle of 2022, a construction business said it was interested in buying the surface rights to the La Plasa commercial property. For many of the people who had the surface rights to something that didn’t make them any money and that they had to pay property taxes on every year, the offer to buy must have come as a nice surprise. This was especially true because the City Council hadn’t suggested anything like this to them in well than twenty years. They chose to accept the deal right away. They were even more confused when they found out that the City Council had paid the building business a lot of money for the same rights that they had sold just six months earlier. The construction company’s bid made the City Council more interested in buying the surface rights to the upper floors of La Plasa. The city would have gotten back the rights to the surface of the whole building in 16 years. But in just 48 hours, from April Fool’s Day to the New Year’s Eve countdown in 2022, it bought it for €3.9 million, which was 87% of the surface area of several floors that were not being utilised and were not up to code. In fact, to fix up the building, it gave contracts for work that was already going on at a cost of additional €8.2 million. This brought the total cost to the public to get La Plasa back under municipal ownership to nearly €12 million.

Millimetre

Sources got information that the complaint said there was a “dizzying” development of events, with “millimetre” coordination between reports, resolutions, awards, and records. The economic result was “clearly favourable” for the selling company, which made a capital gain of close to two million euros. The complaint also suggests that there was a “preconceived design, carefully executed, with a clearly financial purpose.”

The PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) said that this was a benefit that came at the cost of public finances, “disguised as an administrative procedure, built upon allegedly biased reports and assessments devoid of any technical logic.” They think that “a prior agreement between different public and private actors to directly and intentionally benefit by changing procedures, manipulating timelines, and using technical reports for their own ends” may have happened. An operation that shows a total misuse of power. The PSOE’s complaint says that the events could show proof of crimes like bribery, embezzlement, misconduct, influence peddling, and falsifying records.

Technical papers and the land registry that prove the municipal management

People who work for the People’s Party (PP) government said that they knew about this complaint. They also said that the cadastral valuation was added to these evaluations, which raised the price of the building to 14 million euros. The fee is much higher than what was finally paid. The same sources said that the technical reports from the city’s Legal and Auditing departments oversaw and authorised the process.