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It can happen back home as well - Chebsey & Co

It can happen back home as well

As a lawyer I regularly get people coming to me with their problems which I am expected to try and resolve by finding some solution or other. This isn’t always possible as sometimes people come to me right at the last minute when it has all gone terribly wrong. I remember one particular person coming to me and telling me that their house had been repossessed a couple of years ago and wanted to know whether they could do anything about it!

I also regularly speak to people who haven’t done things correctly – they have cut corners, they have tried to be clever and have thought that they could circumvent the system by not following the rules. Generally speaking these people haven’t used a lawyer or a surveyor or obtained a valuation or any number of things that they would normally do when back in their home country.

One common theme that runs through these conversations is that I often hear them say something along the lines of “I will never buy a property in that country again”. They are obviously upset and bitter about what has happened to them and therefore I bite my tongue. What I really want to say to these people is “Why? You didn’t do things properly, it went wrong and now you blame the system and the country?”

Of course there are people who have had genuine problems which they are in no way the cause of. Some of these problems have been caused by failings in the legal system of that country. However, the vast majority of people who say this to me are, to put it bluntly, partially responsible for the predicament that they find themselves in.

Now I am not here to pass judgement on these people – after all, if they get things wrong I can charge them for trying to sort out the mess that they are in. However, I would much rather that people did things properly in the first place. I also don’t like seeing a country or a legal system being tainted because of the problems of an individual.

I was speaking to a local contact of mine the other day. They don’t deal with Spain but had read the horror stories in the press. They informed me that they didn’t want to buy in Spain “because the government cane come and take your property from you”. I think that they were referring to the so called “Land Grab” law in Valencia but somehow they thought that it was the government taking people’s land. I didn’t have time to go through with him in detail why his statement was so wrong but I didn’t briefly go through it with him. His misunderstanding as to what the true situation wasn’t surprising – after all he had simply believed what had been reported. What did surprised me is that he said this in the first place. I live (as does he) in one of the areas that is going to be affected by the proposed High Speed Train from London to Birmingham (HS2). The proposed route goes right past the village that I live in. Undoubtedly some people along the line will have their properties compulsorily purchased to make this route happen. The point that I am making is that similar things can happen in the UK but for some reason because the majority of people don’t understand the system abroad they mistrust it and therefore think that there is something sinister happening. Of course the scare stories in the press don’t help!

I was mildly amused this week when, for the first time, the reverse of this happened. I have been helping out a Spanish national who has had problems with a legal situation in the UK. I obviously can’t go into specifics but what I can say is that they were locked up for a while and have now been released (although he did plead guilty). Speaking to his brother yesterday I was informed that he would never step foot in the UK again as he doesn’t trust the legal system. For some reason he thinks that he is going to be arrested as soon as he lands in the UK. Again I had to bite my lip because he had made his mind up that this is the way it is and nobody could persuade him otherwise. The reality is that not everybody who comes into the UK is arrested and his brother had admitted to what he was accused of. However, his brother didn’t understand the system here, didn’t trust it and decided that he would never step foot in the country again. The fact that his brother had pleaded guilty seemed to have been forgotten in his willingness to blame the British system.

So why am I telling you this? Well, for a start to remind you that some of the legal problems that people have are partially caused by their own actions or inactions and therefore hopefully stop you making the same mistakes. There is plenty that you can do to protect your own legal situation in any country and you should do what you can. Do things correctly and you are less likely to get yourself into problems. Secondly to remind you that problems can happen anywhere. In any legal system you can find injustices or situations which appear not to be fair but these are not limited to a particular country.

Therefore, providing that you are protecting yourself this should not put you off doing something. Thirdly to remind you that the legal systems in different countries are different. Sometimes they are better, sometimes they are worse, but they are rarely exactly the same.

Uploaded October 2011

Peter Esders

Peter Esders is a UK Solicitor who studied Spanish law in Spain and who has been dealing with Spanish law for over 15 years. He can be contacted at www.chebsey.com


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