La Manga Club in Murcia filed for bankruptcy protection

La Manga Club in Murcia filed for bankruptcy protection. Owned by George Soris’s company MedGroup, the company says that they will continue to trade, but will take ‘very strong measures’ to make the company viable.
They purchased the club from P&O for 102 million pounds in 2004. It includes three golf courses, 28 tennis courts, 8 football pitches, a spa, 1,800 private villas and apartments, and a 5 star Hyatt Regency hotel. It’s one of the most complete tourist complexes in Spain and one of the best in Europe, and currently employs 700 workers.
The Concurso Voluntario de Acreedores was placed in the mercantile court in Murcia, but the judge has yet to make any decision on the case.
The situation implies that the firm has problems meeting debts which are pending. Some reports say that its banks have declined to re-finance part of a 97 million € debt, despite its assets being valued at 170 million.
The La Manga Club is well known internationally as it has been used by many tennis stars, such as Anna Kourniokova and football teams such as Manchester United and Real Madrid for training.

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severe fall-off in bookings is alarming tourist authorities and businesses.

The severe fall-off in bookings is alarming tourist authorities and businesses.
Figures from the Spanish tourist industry reveal that the number of Britons who visited Spain in November, for example, was down by 15% on 2007.
The fall has closely tracked the decreasing value of the pound. Britons began to turn their backs on Spain in September, when numbers were down 5%, reaching 7% in October. Last month's dramatic decline came after the pound had lost 25% of its value against the euro in a year. With the pound and the euro now apparently heading for parity, tourist authorities fear that worse will come ? with the all-important summer season now looking grim. Thousands of Britons are dropping traditional holidays to Spain because of the weakness of the pound and fears over the after-effects of the banking crisis. "We are seeing principal markets fall away," explained Marien Andr?, of the Catalan government's Tourism Observatory. "Everything has become very volatile." That is causing alarm in a country which relies on a steady flow of Britons to keep its tourism sector buoyant. Some 17 million British tourists land at Spanish airports or drive across the border every year, according to the Foreign Office, accounting for almost one in three tourists who visit Spain, which earns 11% of GDP from tourism. The Canary Islands, where the mild winters attract many of end-of-year British tourists, have seen the number arriving this winter fall by 15%, while the Costa del Sol area around Malaga suffered even worse, with visitors down by 17%. Spanish hotels have dropped their prices by 2% this year, but this has not been enough to hang on to British tourists - many of whom now prefer to rent houses and apartments online or off friends and relatives. While British people are abandoning their Spanish holidays, however, Spaniards are beginning to fill the budget airline seats that they are leaving empty. The weakness of the pound has made England suddenly seem cheap to Spaniards who previously found Britain's most popular tourist spots too expensive. With the euro also stretching much further in British shops, Spaniards who last year traveled to New York to hunt for bargains in the post-Christmas sales have been booking into London hotels. Spanish internet hotel booking sites report increases of up to 70% in London bookings for immediately after Christmas. Bookings for flights plus hotels were up 80%, according to one portal. One route, from the northern city of La Coruna, to London is carrying double the number of passengers this year compared with 2007.
"The attraction of London is very strong,'' said one travel agent. "It is not that far away and its currency is weak." Newspaper travel supplements in recent weeks have been full of the bargain prices in London, with iPods now 25% cheaper there than in Spain. Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper filled three pages on Monday to explain to its readers the advantages of traveling to London in the coming months.
"No one doubts that this year London will be the favored destination for those who, despite the economic crisis, still want to keep traveling," the paper said.
Not all Spaniards, however, were mourning the disappearance of the British tourist. "They only ever spend their money on alcohol and then they have to be carted off to hospital after they get drunk and pass out,'' said a comment posted on La Vanguardia's website. "Perhaps we can start bringing in quality tourism now."

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arrest of 20 members of a suspected international counterfeit money distribution network, operating in Spain and Portugal.

code-named ‘Margarita-Kuskus,’ in Alicante, Valencia, Murcia, Malaga, Almeria and Lugo provinces, has led to the arrest of 20 members of a suspected international counterfeit money distribution network, operating in Spain and Portugal.
The operation, carried out in collaboration with the European Union's criminal intelligence agency (Europol), also resulted in the seizure of 150,000 fake euros in 50 and 20 euro denominations destined for distribution in Spain.

The investigation was launched toward the end of last year after in increase in false bank notes was detected in circulation in Alicante and Lugo Provinces. Given that the modus operandi of these crimes was the same in both provinces, Guardia Civil officers from both agreed to work in partnership on the investigation.

Once the distributors, mostly of North African origin, were identified and located, they were arrested. One of those arrested, a Torrevieja resident, with dual Spanish-Moroccan nationality who had worked as a judicial interpreter, now faces further charges of passing confidential information relating to the case to the criminal gang.The investigation revealed that the main distribution point in Spain was in Alicante Province, between Callosa del Segura and Torrevieja. The boss of the gang was identified as being from Torrevieja and three of his partners in crime were from nearby Callosa del Segura.Towards the end of October this year, Guardia Civil officers followed the head of the gang and stopped him at a toll-booth on the A-7 in Puzol, Valencia. It is believed he was on his way to southern Italy, with the intention of purchasing a large quantity of fake notes. When they searched his car, they found six wads of 20,000 euros in 20 euro bills. He was arrested along with another two men of North African origin, whose job was allegedly to make contact with other gang members, resident in Italy, where the counterfeit notes were printed by the Calabrian Mafia, ‘Ndrangheta’, one of the most powerful and violent known crime organizations in Italy.It is believed that other members of the organisation periodically travelled to Italy where they purchased the false money and smuggled it back into Spain hidden in specially designed compartments in their vehicles. As a security measure, the vehicle carrying the cash was always escorted ahead by a second vehicle whose purpose was to act as a look-out for any police presence or checks.

Once the money was in Spain, it was stored and at several premises between Callosa del Segura and Redovan, in the Orihuela area. From there, the notes were then distributed throughout Spain, Portugal and North Africa.

In a similar pattern to that known to be used by drug- trafficking gangs, the organisation had a further network of people who would purchase the fake notes at prices between 30 and 40 per cent of their face value. They would then introduce the money into the legal economic system, making small purchases that generally managed to avoid detection.Once the money had been changed into authentic cash, it was laundered through the purchase of properties, vehicles and other goods, often in other people’s names to avoid drawing attention to themselves.

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purple €500 notes are so rarely seen that they have earned the nickname “Bin Ladens”.

Spain is estimated to have one of the biggest black economies in Europe, accounting for between 20 and 23% of annual GDP. Spanish tax authorities are investigating 12,000 big transactions involving €500 notes.

It is, perhaps, the strangest idea yet for pumping extra liquidity into Europe’s troubled banking system. Spanish officials were yesterday reported to be looking for ways of encouraging Spaniards to remove the estimated 108m €500 notes they have hoarded in safes or under floorboards and take them to the bank. That averages out to at least two per Spaniard, or a total of €54bn, circulating outside the country’s banking system.

A combination of tax-cheating and a long-standing mistrust of banks, means Spain soaks up a quarter of all the €500 notes - one of the world’s highest denomination bank bills - released every year.One option for getting the notes into the banking system, by offering a no-questions-asked fiscal amnesty, was ruled out by the finance minister Pedro Solbes yesterday. El Mundo newspaper reported, however, that there had been pressure from within the government’s finance team to consider a fiscal amnesty. Spain’s tax inspectors, whose job it is to root out the notes when they are used for tax fraud, were among those opposing the idea.The purple €500 notes are so rarely seen that they have earned the nickname “Bin Ladens”.Most are used in real estate deals, where property is often bought and sold in a mixture of fiscally opaque cash and fiscally transparent bank transfers. The price of property deals reported to the tax authorities is, therefore, often much lower than that really paid.Other notes circulate in the country’s black economy. Sectors including the footwear industry, construction or silversmiths are thought to do much of their business in black currency.

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Fortuna Land scam was run out of offices on the Costa del Sol using companies registered in places like Cyprus and Delaware (USA).

The Spanish land investment scam run for years by Fortuna Estates has finally been busted, with the Spanish fraud squad swooping last week on several office in Mijas and Fuengirola, arresting at least 2 people, and questioning 20 others. This could be one of the biggest Spanish property scams to date, with hundreds, if not thousands of British and Irish victims. The Spanish authorities estimate that Fortuna Estates made at least 65 million Euros out of this fraud.Still under official secrecy orders, the police have released few details about “Operation Fuentespino”, but the Spanish press reports that there could be more than 2,000 victims, mainly middle class investors from the United Kingdom and Ireland.Fortuna Estates, which had changed its name to Fortuna Land (Investment) by 2007, snared its victims with the promise of high returns from land reclassification projects in rural Andalucia.

“Watch your investment in raw undeveloped land turn into commercial projects with multi-million euro potential,” promised Fortuna Estates, which started selling ‘shares’ in its projects in 2002.

Fortuna Estates contacted potential investors at through property exhibitions, cold calls and mailing lists, and a fairly substantial advertising campaign in the British quality press.Claiming to be the “leading land investment agency based in Southern Spain,” Fortuna Estates offered its clients ‘shares’ in greenfield projects purporting to turn land in out-of-the-way parts of Andalucia into hot commercial property investments.
“Working primarily in the commercial sector of land development, Fortuna Estates has developed a program of investment techniques that bring this highly lucrative sector within the grasp of the ordinary investor,” claimed Fortuna. Targeting the ‘ordinary investor’ was a key part of Fortuna’s strategy. It claimed it was making high-return land investments accessible to people who could not otherwise afford them. Many of Fortuna’s victims probably invested the minimum of around 10,000 Euros, and the vast majority probably had no experience of land reclassification or the realities of investing in Spanish property.Fortuna sold various different projects over time, starting with a project called Bella Fortuna, then going on to sell projects called Sierra Fortuna, and Cazadores Reales.An insight into how Fortuna hooked its clients with talk of high returns, backed up with invented figures, can be gained from Fortuna’s sales material. “These factors have contributed towards the success of the Bella Fortuna project,” goes the patter. “This plot of stunning Andalucian countryside is over 400,000m² in size and located midway between Malaga and Granada, next to the town of Zafarraya. This project was first released to private investors in Sept 2002 at a price of €6.80m² and closed at a price of €9.20m² 14 months later. In Oct 2004 official planning permission for the Hotel Zafarraya complex was granted and the land was then independently valued at €37.59m².”The valuations were meaningless, as Fortuna made them up to make it look like investors were making big profits, on paper at least. This was enough to keep filling the pipeline with new investors, and convince existing clients to invest more money in new projects. Some of Fortuna Land’s hapless investors are thought to have invested in as many as 3 of their projects.Fortuna also beguiled it clients by doing all transactions through ‘independent’ lawyers and notaries, and giving clients “legally notarised title deed to the land in which they have invested.”
“ Whether your investment is for 5 acres or just a quarter of an acre, every investment is secured by physical ownership of the title document,” Fortuna assured its investors.
The plans Fortuna had for its land reclassification projects, and the way in which it kept changing them and announcing delays should have had investors’ alarm bells ringing. Plans veered around from hotels with a wedding chapel, to retirement homes, to solar farms. At one point, after long delays, they claimed they had received ‘verbal’ planning permission, but there is no evidence that Fortuna were serious about delivering on their promises.Most of the victims of this scam are thought to be British, though Irish and Germans investors are also thought to be involved. As an article in the Spanish daily ‘El Pais’ points out, the British have fallen for numerous scams on the Costa del Sol over the last decade, mainly involving property.
The Fortuna Land scam was run out of offices on the Costa del Sol using companies registered in places like Cyprus and Delaware (USA). Currently the Fortuna Land website (fortunaland.es), claims they have “implemented a strategic relationship with The Oanna Group to realise your investment projects in Spain,” and instruct visitors to direct all future communications to oannagroup.com. The Oanna Group appear to have an office in London.Despite making several arrests, the Spanish police do not think they have nabbed any of the masterminds, who are thought to have disappeared, and may already be working on their next scam.Indeed, ‘El Pais’ reports that victims of the Fortuna Estates fraud have already been targeted by new scam that promises to recover their money for a fee of 10% of their investment paid up front.

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Death of the Beach Bars,500 bars and restaurants in the Malaga province alone have been built on the sand in contravention to planning regulations

Coastal authority of Andalusia has announced plans to enforce a 1988 law designed to prevent construction within 100 yards of the waterline. An estimated 500 bars and restaurants in the Malaga province alone have been built on the sand in contravention to planning regulations, authorities claim. Around 300 of them will be forced to close when their concessions end next year. Javier Hermoso, the chief of beaches on the eastern Costa del Sol, said closing the bars and clearing the coastline had become his main objective since taking office in September. "It will be a long complicated process because nothing has been enforced for 20 years," he told local newspaper La Opinion de Malaga. Critics of the move fear that the clamp down will lead to huge job losses at time when the area is already suffering a downturn in the tourist industry. "We are talking about making 7000 people out of work in Malaga alone with this move," said Norberto Del Castillo, of the Federation of Beach Businesses of Andalusia. Others said it would drive tourists away. "A beach without a beach bar is one lacking the essential elements," said one commentator in Malaga. "They are a tourist must-have. Eating and drinking with the sea nearby and one's feet in the sand is one of greatest delights of the beach."

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