No redress for aggrieved property owners - but fight goes on to European court

Alicante becomes drier, more desert-like, the further south you travel

Alicante becomes drier, more desert-like, the further south you travel. The Moors built an oasis at Elche, diverting the brackish waters of the Vinalopo river into a network of canals to irrigate a lush green forest of palm trees, which is still there and is now a UN world heritage site.

Real estate developers have shown no such sensitivity towards their environment. Due to the construction boom, Alicante's coastline is paved in concrete, and developers are now attacking the dry, barren hills behind the coast.

Maria Harling (not her real name), a retired nurse from London, settled here to escape a cruel relationship. She thought a warm climate would be kinder to her health after suffering two heart attacks in the UK. She did not have much in the way of savings, but found a modest bungalow with an orange grove close to La Granja de Rocamora, just south of Elche. She was the first black person to settle in the village, but says she encountered no racism and quickly made many Spanish friends.

In January this year, La Granja de Rocamora's town hall approved a housing development on Maria's orange grove and surrounding farms - but not before friends and relatives of the mayor had been let in on the scheme and had begun to acquire farmland at rock-bottom prices. (Maria says water for irrigation was cut off last year to lower the value of farmland in her district.)

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Municipal governments have the authority to reclassify "rural" land into "urban" land, making it instantly available for development. When land is reclassified, its value can increase more than 100- fold. With building land increasingly scarce, reclassification has become the biggest racket on Spain's Mediterranean coast.

Municipal officials take bribes to reclassify land, while friends and relations are tipped off to buy rural plots earmarked for reclassification so they can make a killing overnight. Francisco Rocamora Bernabeu, deputy mayor and the cousin of mayor Jose Ruiz Rocamora, admitted in an interview he was "a small landowner" in the area earmarked for development. He said it was "likely" that Procumasa, a big Alicante building company selected to "develop" the new housing project, was also buying. The area has not yet been reclassified "urban" because the housing project is waiting for clearance from the Valencian government.

Rocamora Bernabeu insists that the plans were discussed at a meeting with landowners "about a year ago", and that a vast majority of the affected property holders approved the housing project. But neither Maria, nor any of her neighbours, were invited to the meeting.

Ruiz Rocamora, the mayor, has told Maria that half of her orange grove will be confiscated for the housing development, and she will have to pay €240,000 towards urbanisation costs. "At my age I cannot take out a mortgage on my property, and if I don't pay the urbanisation costs, the mayor says the property developer can confiscate a further 40 per cent of my property," Maria says.

Procumasa is the fourth-largest builder in the province of Alicante. Its website advertises the company, in English and Spanish, as "a leading company in promoting and developing new residential areas". But a spokeswoman said she had no information on the Granja de Rocamora housing scheme. Nor could she confirm that Procumasa had been buying farmland in the area.

It is pointless to fight the property development laws in Spain. Magistrates rarely authorise injunctions to halt construction of a disputed development, and when they do, it is usually for just a few days.

"There is no redress for aggrieved property owners through the Spanish courts," says Chuck Svoboda, a retired Canadian diplomat and Benissa resident who founded Abusos Urbanisticos No ("No to Urban Abuses") to fight town-planning corruption on the coast. Svoboda is a tireless campaigner, a phenomenal networker and a thorn in the side of Rosello, Benissa's mayor.

Without him, Valencia's town-planning laws would never have come to the attention of the European Commission. His lobby group now has more than 17,000 members. Svoboda says Valencia's town-planning laws have transformed the region into "Ruritania on the Med".

"You cannot halt the bulldozers tearing through your property with a court injunction. If you refuse to pay the 'urbanisation fees' demanded by property developers, your house is embargoed. And you cannot sell your house and walk away from the nightmare, because the moment a new residential plan is approved, your house will lose all its value," he says.

Svoboda says Valencia's town-planning law makes no attempt to define the "public interest" - the only legal argument in Spain that justifies the confiscation of property. "The fundamental flaw with the law is that responsibility for town planning is handed over to property developers, who are allowed to initiate schemes and propose new areas for development. As a result, it is not the public interest that is being served, but private profit."

IMACULADA Rosas, a property lawyer in Marbella, agrees. "The costs of legal action against property developers are prohibitive," she says. "A magistrate could take a year just to read your petition. It could be 10 years before he hands down a sentence, by which time the properties are already built, the new owners have moved in, and the property developer, in all likelihood, is no longer in business. So there would be nobody responsible for paying compensation even if the courts did find in your favour. There is no redress for property abuses in Spain.

"Criminal proceedings are rarely pursued against property developers," she says. "A judge will often ask for an administrative court to rule whether building permits are valid or not, and this also takes years. "The legal system is bankrupt. The law is not responding.

"We need special courts to act with speed against corruption in the construction business."The plight of land-grab victims, however, has come to the attention of Irwin Mitchell, the British law firm. It has now lodged land-grab cases before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, with the intention of setting a legal precedent and establishing the grounds for more cases to be determined in favour of victims of abuse.

Normally, land-grab cases would have to work their way up the Spanish legal system before being heard at the European Court of Human Rights. But Irwin Mitchell argues that the Spanish legal system is so slow, that "justice delayed is justice denied". Based on this principle, the Strasbourg tribunal is being asked to examine the grievances of property owners in Spain.

Irwin Mitchell believes town-planning laws in several Spanish regions violate human rights. "There is the right to the peaceful enjoyment of private property, and the issue of timely access to justice," says Hugh Robertson, a lawyer with the firm. "The abuse of town-planning laws often hits people who can least afford to fight back: old people, retired people who live off their pensions and cannot afford to pay the urbanisation fees demanded by property developers or meet the cost of litigation."

Last month, the Spanish government took the unprecedented step of dissolving the city council of Marbella following the exposure of a construction racket run by town planners.Spain's Socialist government has made clear that it wants to stop the rot in Marbella, the most notorious example of the construction-fuelled corruption that has infected municipal governments along the coast. The only surprise is that it has taken prosecutors so long to act. Other resorts are coming under investigation.

What remains to be seen is how far the Spanish government will go to halt the town-planning abuses that have lined the pockets of officials, undermined public faith in local democracy, and caused so much misery to tens of thousands of Spanish and foreign property owners.

Leslie Crawford is the FT's bureau chief in Madrid