Editorial:
Home sales are up (with 400,000 forecast by the end of 2015), but prices remain static say the estate agents – mainly because the banks are selling off their repossessed properties on the cheap. Can the estate agents compete with the banks that pay/receive no commission? No they can’t. So, once again, as some real estate agents are forced to finally throw in the towel after seven lean years, the banks are causing more problems than they solve.
Housing:
Some investors in Jumilla, Murcia, are due to get their money returned: ‘Jerez law firm Abolex Abogados, led by Martín de la Herrán, took on the cases of some 40 British families, many of them pensioners, who lost deposits of up to €100,000 when Herrada del Tollo folded in 2008, leaving their homes unbuilt. Scottish retiree Joan MacLachlan stood in court twice as she battled to reclaim the €38,000 deposit she put down in March 2006 for one of the 1,500 properties in Jumilla, Murcia...’. Story at The Olive Press.
A Dutch project to build 160 homes specially adapted for disabled residents is unlikely to go ahead, says Diario Información. The plan was to build the homes in Huertos del Montgó in Jávea (Alicante), but the Town Hall has now taken a step backwards and has declared the land must be used for other purposes. The project included shops, sports facilities and an on-site doctor and physiotherapist and would have been a new and useful type of ‘residential tourism’, but the interpretation of the licence by the Town Hall says that only a medical centre would be legal on the estate in question.
An agency called Domus Venari provides the ‘Eight Documents That Will Ensure a Safe and Legal Spanish Property Purchase’.
Tourism:
Spain does well from Sol y Playa tourism, but is always on the look-out to broaden its appeal. Turismo Rural, Turismo de Gastronomía, Turismo de Salud and Turismo Cultural are obvious examples of ‘niche tourism’. El Diario is presenting a study on different kinds of tourism here.
The Imserso row is almost over. As Nexotur reports, Mundosenior can now offer tours for Imserso customers – senior citizens – anywhere except to the Canaries and Balearic Islands as these are still under study by a branch of Hacienda as Mundosenior and their rival Mundiplan battle for the juicy contract (a solution could still be months away!). The Government has published the Imserso agreements to date for coastal, interior and foreign travels, here (PDF). In all, this and the following winter season can expect 938,000 trips.
Finance:
Hacienda has found another 7,300 million euros of Spanish money stashed in various Fiscal Paradises, says El País, to be added to the 126,500 million already admitted to by Spaniards and foreign residents using the Modelo 720 tax declaration for foreign assets.
Those who owe over a million euros in taxes – and Hacienda says there are better than 5,000 of these sinners – can expect to see their names (or company names) in lights from December when Hacienda publishes their identities in full together with the fines and amounts owing, says El Mundo here. Or perhaps, they’ll wait until after the elections...
In 2013, eighty one Spanish bankers earned over two million euros (three of them made over five million), the second highest number of bankers in this bracket in Europe (after the UK). Story at Gurusblog.
The lure of cheap taxes in Ireland has found another Spanish company – this time, one based in Catalonia called Grifols – which is a major pharmaceutical manufacturer.
Texas, erstwhile leader in oil, is now the largest user of wind energy in the USA. The Spanish company Iberdrola can claim credit for this with its largest wind farm in the world (269 aero-generators) near the Mexican border at Peñascal, Corpus Christi. See El País.
Good news or bad? Kyero goes with ‘good’: ‘...the total number of people registered unemployed in Spain reached a total of 4,850,800, which is the lowest level recorded since the second quarter of 2011, while the unemployment rate dropped by 1.19 points, to stand at 21.18%. The Entertainer Online goes with ‘maybe’: ‘...But not in Andalucía, where six of the eight andaluz provinces have unemployment over 30%. The highest is Cádiz at 37.2%, which is 25 points more unemployment than Spain's lowest, Soria at 12%. Andalucía's hardest working province is Málaga at 29% unemployed (thanks, no doubt, to the tourism)...’. And then, there’s Nueva Tribuna, who says that the new jobs aren’t always worth much and that ‘...the "recovery" claimed by the PP has in fact destroyed 884,099 jobs - Despite the euphoria of the government, the EPA certifies that – since 2011 – there are 33 million fewer working hours...’. You can see the paro, by province, here.
Politics:
Rajoy was in a ‘small’ political meeting in Finestrat, Alicante, last Saturday, where he promised that twenty million Spaniards would be in work by 2019. The PSOE, he noted, was unsure of its plans and would inevitably bring Spain back to the past... See El Mundo.
Mariano Rajoy gave an interview on Spanish TV on Monday night. As Typically Spanish reports, Rajoy said ‘From now until December 20 we have to make an effort in education, so the Spaniards return to trust the PP, and explain that over the last legislature which was ‘hard and complicated’ and ‘full of difficult decisions’ things ‘had changed for the better’. El Español notes that the ‘share’ of the TV interview was small, with just 11% of viewers.
The high unemployment rate in Andalucía could be slightly shrunk if the regional president Susana Díaz were to order jobs created next year for an extra 7,100 public employees (‘funcionarios’) to keep the region on its toes... La Voz de Almería reports here.
The leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, has quit his job as a Euro MP with a speech saying ‘I am returning to my country to work there to ensure that we don’t have any more politicians like you people placed in the next Spanish Government’. Neat, hey? The ‘mainstream’ press nevertheless considers that Iglesias is tired and losing his concentration. El Mundo quotes PP Vice-president Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría in a radio interview as saying ‘…for such a young chap, he’s burnt himself out rather quickly’. A reader tells us that Iglesias is generally known in Brussels as ‘The Nephew of Ceaușescu’.
General Elections 20D:
The Financial Times weighs in: ‘Friends and foes alike misinterpret the recovery’. The opinion piece begins: ‘The looming general election has, quite predictably, made Spain a political battleground over the merit of the policies pursued by the sitting centre-right government led by Mariano Rajoy and his People’s Party. But the politics is playing catch-up: for several years, Spain has also been the focus of a battle of economic ideas, about how best to understand the eurozone crisis, the aborted recovery of 2010-11 and the right policies with which to address downturns in a currency union...’.
Catalonia:
‘The Catalan regional assembly opened a new session on Monday dominated for the first time by a secessionist majority that has vowed to break away from Spain within 18 months. "We represent a sovereign parliament which wants to represent a free people. We are transitioning from a regional parliament with limited powers to a national parliament with full capabilities," said Carme Forcadell, the parliament's new president...’. See The Local. Supporting Forcadell, alongside the Junts pel Sí and CUP, were five members of the Sí Que Es Pot (Podemos) group – with full support for breaking ranks with their fellow party members shown by Pablo Iglesias here.
The two separatist groups in the Catalan parliament have agreed on a document declaring “the beginning of the process to create an independent Catalan state.” Says El País in English, although the Junts pel Sí and CUP haven’t yet agreed on Artur Mas as the Regional President – a vote should be held on November 9th. Meanwhile, ‘Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy warned on Tuesday that the Spanish state would not withhold the use of any available political or legal tools when it came to defending Spain and upholding its law and Constitution...’. From El País in English. More coverage in English at Politico here.
Wolf Street on Barcelona City Hall’s plans to launch a parallel currency: ‘Over the next six months, Barcelona’s left-wing city council plans to roll out a cash-less local currency that has the potential to become the largest of its kind in the world. The main goal of the project, according to a council spokesperson, is to boost economic opportunities for local businesses and traders...’. Predictably, the opposition to the scheme in Madrid is fierce.
Independence:
While Catalonia is briefly stymied by rearguard actions from the other parties in the Generalitat from its march towards independence, there are plenty of other regions with ideas above their station... take the Independence for Castilla group, who want, er, Cantabria, Castilla y León, La Rioja, Castilla-La Mancha and Madrid (but not the rest of Spain) all under one flag. Not really independence, but ‘sovereignist’. The Almería initiative to leave Andalucía (in its defence, Almería voted against joining with Seville back in 1980) is, or should be, well known (although, it is not too keen on joining the next door one-province autonomy of Murcia). El Bierzo, a region in Castilla y León, also wants its own autonomy. There’s the Basques with their seven province country – of which three of them are currently in France, while another is its own next-door autonomy of Navarre (Pamplona to become the capital of the extended Euskal Herria). Then there are Galicia and other regions... plus of course the ‘Campo de Gibraltar’: the ‘ninth province of Andalucía’ (some hope...). How about Cartagena, which has long sought independence from Spain, fought a war against Madrid in 1873 (‘La Rebelión Cantonal’) while trying to join the United States of America as an overseas territory? (Mostly from an article at El Mundo).
Corruption:
The director of El Diario is Ignacio Escolar. Ignacio claims to have the entire confession of Francisco Correa, the alleged leader of the Gürtel Case, which was a vast scandal of corruption in the Madrid and Valencian offices of the Partido Popular. The confession names Luis Bárcenas, the ex-treasurer of the PP, as well as many others. It makes for fascinating reading. The Minister for Justice Rafael Catalá says that the confession has little merit as ‘it only tries to exculpate Correa’. Report at El Mundo.
Andalucía is – by far – the most corrupt region of Spain, says Periodista Digital here. The General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) reports that there are currently 2,173 major (and complicated) judicial inquiries going on in Spain, which include 1,661 cases to do with corruption, of which, 541 are in Andalucía, 200 in Valencia and 153 in Madrid. The CGPJ also says they need more judges to keep up...
Various:
A senior member of Podemos, Pablo Echenique, has called off a conference in London because the Brits wouldn't allow his wife, who is Venezuelan, to accompany him for visa reasons. Perhaps the British Home Office considers that Echenique, who is severely disabled and wheelchair bound, can push himself around.
It’s always nice to hear of growth in some field, if unfortunately, that field happens to be infested with lawyers... The Xornal de Galicia says that we have more lawyers than ever in Spain. There are officially 132,000 of them arranging our lives.
‘Zara Founder Briefly Overtakes Bill Gates As Richest Person In The World. Amancio Ortega is worth nearly $79 billion’. A self-explanatory headline from The Huff Post.
The Caja Mágica, a tennis centre in Madrid built during the twelve year long attempt to bring home the Olympic Games, and which cost 300 million euros, has never found much of a use, says Vozpópuli disparagingly.
The OJD is the official audit of newspaper copies sold (or given away). Here is a list of the Andalucía titles, followed by the main national ones. El País remains the biggest at 217,715 copies, La Vanguardia sells 130, 055 and El Mundo, third, with just 122,607 copies.
From Wikipedia (and illustrative of the inaccurate yet revered INE statistics agency) ‘...the British population of Spain in 2014 was estimated to be about 300,286. According to the BBC, there are 761,000 British residents in Spain...’ (Thanks to Jake).
‘...“I risk my life when I kill a bull, and I think that gesture awards the bull a lot more dignity than what it would find at a slaughterhouse. And in these times of such environmental awareness, it is essential to recognize that the bulls and the dehesas [free-range estates where they are bred] contribute an ecological wealth that would be unthinkable without the fights.”...’. Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez in an article in El País in English.
How Spain got its fifty provinces. Story at Vozpópuli.
TripAdvisor is sometimes over-used by marketing buffs. Here are sixteen perfectly horrible places in Spain (according to disgruntled or flat-ignorant visitors), which the rest of us thought were wonderful. And, in a similar vein, here are the ten towns with the oddest names to be found in Spain.
Finally:
José Padilla with Ibiza chill music. ‘Adios Ayer’.
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