Almuñécar owes eight million euros in legal fees to a local legal firm, thanks to the constant court cases against the municipality. All of this sum was accrued under Juan Carlos Benavides.

The local lawyer, Antonio Taset Díaz, who has a monument/plaque dedicated to him right in front of the town-hall building, has recently retired and the law firm is being closed down. The company charged with winding down his affairs, which have spanned 50 years, has handed over the outstanding bills, all precisely detailed down to the last letter.

Of course, such an ‘inherited’ debt completely throws the town’s balance sheets out the window. To give you an idea, in June of last year, Almuñécar received a 17m-euro loan from the Central Government in order that it could pay off all the accumulated bills to local traders between 2001 and 2011. Salobreña received 11m euros for the same thing, so you can appreciate what a mess an extra 8m-euro debt causes.

Don Antonio Taset was not the only lawyer that handled cases for the Town Hall, but he was by far the ‘most employed,’ which was how he managed to knock up this amount of fees between 2003 and 2011.

The first thing that the Town Hall did upon receiving this unsavoury news was hand the affair over to its own legal department, who will go over the bills to double check that the fees charged are valid – some of the bills might have ‘expired,’ for example.

Even more surprising is that the eight million is the figure arrived at after the law firm applied some heavy discount, says the Town Hall. Furthermore, in the last 15 years the Town Hall has already paid the said law firm over a million.

In 2002 the town named a street after Antonio Taset in the San Cristóbal, and then in 2011 dedicated a small plaque mounted on a marble block to him in front of the town-hall building. Lastly, Sr. Taset used to be the Municipal Secretary and legal adviser to the Town Hall.

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