This appears to be another case of the perils involved in obtaining a building licence in Spain.
In 2004 a group of businessmen paid nearly 30m euros for the land on which sits the abandoned Azucarera San Isidro, which is located in the Bobadilla area of the city of Granada.
Although the factory itself is a listed building, it sits in the middle of a sizable piece of land, (101,000 sq/m) apt for development, or if you prefer, for tertiary use. The businessmen had the idea of building a shopping-cum-sports-cum-leisure centre distributed along the following lines: 25% commercial, 60% leisure and 15% cultural.
Yet in ten years nothing has moved because the City Hall effectively moved the goalposts, or better said, bungled it.
When they bought the land or plot, it had a Plan Especial covering it, which permitted the proposed project.
The trouble was that the Plan Especial drawn up by the City Hall included land that didn’t actually belong to the municipality, but to the State, something that the Junta and the Central Government issued a warning over.
The businessmen argued that the City Hall had full knowledge of these warnings coming out of Sevilla and Madrid but drew up the Plan Especial and sold the land to them anyway.
Next came a lawsuit launched by the Attorney General for the Central Government against the Plan Especial which put the shopping-centre project on hold until 2012 when the case was finally resolved by the Supreme Court in favour of the State and the Plan Especial was modified to exclude this disputed land.
To add insult to injury, the City Hall had demanded 2.7m euros on the back of the signed agreement in 2008, even though the case was still in court. As the businessmen refused to pay it for this reason, the City Hall embargoed their bank accounts and estates.
To make matters worse, along came the ADIF (the nationwide, rail-traffic management administration) and slapped a compulsory purchase order on three sections of the land, yet refused to pay the businessmen because the ownership was under litigation, so the money remained locked within the Agencia Municipal Tributaria (municipal tax agency).
Fed up to their back teeth the businessmen are suing the City Hall for 17.4m euros in damages, costs and loss of potential earnings.
The governing party (PP) has thrown up its hands in indignation whilst the opposition parties accuse the Mayor of a level of incompetence that will cost the municipal coffers dearly, if they lose the case.
(News: Metropolitan Area, Granada, Andalucia)