You don’t have to be an expert on banking to know that Spanish banks have behaved irresponsibly, heartlessly and without scruples, and that’s just what the judges think.
Since the crisis began in 2008, the mind-boggling number of 400,000 evictions have been carried out in Spain, thanks to a clearly one-sided law brought into being over a hundred years ago, in 1909.
It is not enough that the banks with indecent haste throw people out of their homes, but even after losing their properties they are still liable for the inflated debt; i.e., property prices that bear no relevance to real, market prices.
Only in Spain amongst all its European neighbours is this unforgivable and avarice-laden practice carried out.
If anybody needed any further proof of the trauma caused by this extremely callous practice, only yesterday a man hung himself just hours before the police came to evict him from his home.
The present conservative government brought out a tepid new law, leaving it up to the banks to annul a mortgage holder’s debt once the property was repossessed, and it has surprised nobody that this naively optimistic measure was completely ignored by Spanish banks.
To add insult to injury, Spanish taxpayers now have to rescue the banks from the consequences of their own runaway greed; i.e., a Spanish Government bank bailout, giving rise to the surreal situation where if the tax payer gets into difficulty, the bank confiscates his property, whereas if the banks get into difficulty, that same taxpayer is expected to save the banks with his tax contribution.
It would not have been unreasonable for the Government to insist that banks that have received public funds to ‘sanitize’ them, have to incorporate the European practice of ‘property repossessed; debt liquidated,’ but that, inexplicably, has not been the case.
Finally, a commission comprising of seven judges has handed over a report to the Consejo General del Poder Judicial; in other words the governing body of the Spanish judiciary, in which it denounces the abuses within the Spanish banking sector.
Pulling no punches, they say that these abuses were founded in an outdated (1909) law governing eviction that was drawn up in a very different Spain.
What the Central Government or the CGPJ, or indeed the banks themselves will do about it remains to be seen, but it is now very much official and not just a generalised lamented echoing around the social media network .
Seaside Gazette
