As if it were not a problem enough for summer parking that the Market underground car park remains closed, now there are problems with the San Cristóbal one.

The new PA under Juan Carlos Benavides laments that through the governing party’s “laxity” the town has “lost the majority”of the parking bays in the San Cristóbal, underground car park, which have been reclaimed by a bank.

So, what the hell is going on, you ask?

The underground-car-park project began life in 2006 when the construction contract was granted to a cooperative of the ‘future, parking-bay owners,’ called Cooperativa Periferia. The car park was to have 405 parking bays.

According to the ex-Mayor, the cooperative made an initial cash injection and then took out a mortgage for over two million euros. The crisis hit and the construction company, Goipesa, went bust. The bank that had extended the mortgage cease to hand over cash installments on the loan and the building work ground to a halt.

With the project dead in the water the cooperative announced that they were pulling out, leaving a huge crater along San Cristobal, fruit of the building excavations. So, the Town Hall came to the rescue and the parking project. At this point the project was valued at more than three-million euros, which had to be fed to the new construction company and to the bank.

Under this new arrangement to original cooperative members who had made down payments were allowed to have their parking bays – in the meantime there was a court case going over Goipesa, who had entered into receivership.

Then the elections came and the Mayor’s office changed hands.

Now, says the PA, they have discovered that the bank has embargoed 357 of the 405 parking bays, some of which have private owners and some are publicly owned. The bank has begun an auction process put them up at half their original price (10,000 euros instead of 21,000).

Back in March of this year the Almuñécar law court sentenced that the mortgage holders had fallen down on their commitments agreed upon in the deeds for the loan and had given the bank the go ahead to put 357 up for auction.

The PA admits that they don’t know whether the Town Hall has launched an appeal against the court sentence but concludes that the governing party has snored whilst all this happened.

We are waiting for a response from the Mayor’s office on this development.

(News: Almunecar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)