Spanish irritation is expressed in an aritcle in El Pais

Spain wants the Gibraltar finance centre to be put on the OECD ‘black list’. This is because, according to the Spanish Treasury, Gibraltar continues to be “opaque, inaccessible and impenetrable.”

This is the thrust of a surprise attack on Gibraltar carried by the daily El Pais. Cooperation with Gibraltar has not advanced as regards fiscal and tax matters, says a spokesman of the Spanish Treasury.

And the information Gibraltar makes available is said to be limited and of little use. The Spanish Treasury thinks that other fiscal paradises like Jersey, those in the Caribbean ‘and even Andorra’ have provided more ¡information when it comes to fighting money laundering.

The question of financial services is one of the topics down for discussion in the much-trumpeted Trilateral Forum. But the Spanish tax department is evidently not satisfied, it is said.

However there is cooperation with police matters in the persecution of an offence, with much of the cooperation taking place in an “underhand” kind of way.

But when there is a request for information on companies, bank current accounts or lawyers offices, the cooperation disappears, a Spanish police source is quoted as saying. This is because this is an area prohibited even to the Gibraltar police, it is claimed.

Tags: spain, gibraltar

MADRID: Spain’s embattled real estate sector received more bad news Friday when it was announced that property sales were down almost 14 per cent last year, with the sharpest decline in the fourth quarter.

“In 2007, the total number of property transactions was 788,518, a drop of 13.93 per cent over 2006,” the CRE, an organisation that collects data on property transactions, said in a report.

The largest drop was in sales of older homes, which saw a decline of 15.05 percent, compared to 12.41 percent in new properties, it said.

In the fourth quarter, the decline was even more pronounced, with transactions plummeting 21 percent from 203,993 in 2006 to 161,906 in the same period in 2007.

The figures are further evidence of the slowdown in the property sector in Spain after years of growth during which millions of new homes were built and prices rocketed.

The government announced in January that property prices rose just 4.8 percent in 2007, down from 9.1 percent the previous year and the lowest increase since the boom in the market began 10 years ago.

Tags: property, spain

A visitor to spanishpropertyinsight writes in:

I read your report on the Spanish property market and found it very lucid and full of wisdom. I bought my first property in Spain in Tenerife in 1983 and have seen a few ups and downs in the market since then. Never more grim than I see it now. I can’t begin to offer you further analysis on your easy to read and perceptive tome but for my part would comment as follows:

The boom in development in the ‘costas’ is in the main driven by greed. There is little consideration for green areas nor the provision of parking. What has amazed me in a new town such as Las Americas in southern Tenerife is that it is basically only around 30 years old. Licences have been granted for some pretty dense development and yet the majority of the properties 10 years old or more have no or little provision for parking. It would have been so sensible to say to a developer, ?OK, you can build it but we want one car space for every apartment and two for every larger property!?

Tags: spanish, property,

The property market is still showing life in Lanzarote.

Tags: lanzarote, property