Judge Baltasar Garzón will have to confront the penal process of prevarication in the Spanish Supreme Court. The Tribunal’s second court-room has decided to begin prosecution based on a complaint in which the famous “star judge” is accused of an obvious crime of prevarication “premeditated, conscious and believing to be not blameworthy for them”, because of his actions as a judge in the process he initiated about the disappearance of people during the Spanish civil war and General Franco’s political regime. The surprising decision of the Penal Room of the Supreme Court had been taken by its president, Juan Saavedra and the magistrates Adolph Prego, Joaquin Giménez, Francisco Monterde and Juan Ramon Berdugo. The resolution was unanimous. Subject of multiple accusations, Garzón so far has been cleared of them all and regarding this latest, filed the past 26th January by the so called Clean Hands Union, there was initially a favourable report in Garzon’s favour from the office of the Supreme Court public prosecutor that, as it has been habitual, exonerated Garzon.
registering a fall of 38.4% in March and insolvency declarations fell by 43.1 percent compared to February.
The April data however shows a 59.4 % increase compared to the same month of 2008. The total number of insolvencies declared in April (2009) was 287, the lowest number for the whole year and one would need to go back to June 2008 to find the lower number of 195. The real estate sector was the only one that registered less Judicial Bodies of Creditors than those in April of 2008 with 11 declarations of bankruptcy, which represented a reduction of 15.4 percent. Meanwhile the construction sector, with 64 insolvencies, continued to be affected with a 52.4 percent increase compared to the same month of 2008. In a worse position were the wholesale trade and intermediaries of commerce with 40 Judicial Bodies of Creditors, 66.7 percent more than in 2008 and the specialized construction sector with 29, an increase of 163.6 percent. Catalonia returned to head the April ranking with 82 Bodies of Creditors, an increase of 67.3% with respect to April 2008. The Community of Madrid was second with 43 companies taking refuge in this procedure, a 95.5% increase compared to 2008. The Valencian community with 35 Judicial Bodies of Creditors (+75%), Andalucía with 23 (+27.8%) and the Basque country with 19 (+46.2%) completes the list respectively.
The verdict concludes that to include a person “in a registry of bad debtors without credibility is an illegitimate attack against one’s reputation since such an accusation of being a defaulting debtor harms the dignity of the person, injures his reputation and impairs the person’s own estimation”. The courts will from now on be able to force banks and companies to compensate the client harmed in cases where third parties are able to access the “false dilatoriness” as this causes “economic consequences to him”, such as the refusal of credits or mortgages.
The verdict confirms a resolution dictated 3rd April by the full session of the First Room of the Spanish Supreme Court and establishes Jurisprudence on the matter.
The verdict dismisses the appeal filed by the bank BBVA against the verdict dictated on December 13th 2001 by the number three Court of First Instance in Tenerife, which gave reason to one client, whose data was communicated to the registries of bad debtors Badex and Asnef-Equifax, after she refused to pay 1,051 Euros charged illegally to her account. The sentence of Tenerife’s court ordered BBVA to pay the plaintiff an indemnity for moral damages of 18,030 Euros plus the legal costs derived from the procedure and to urge the withdrawal of the data made available to the registries of bad debtors. The bank supposedly debited 1,051Euros from the account of the client through her Visa-Classic card. The client asked the bank for the cancellation of the debit on various occasions via telephone, a branch of the bank and through the defender of the client and later issued a charge to the Bank of Spain through the national police. The court dismissed the allegations made by BBVA who claimed that the client was on the bad debtor’s list for only twelve days during which nobody consulted her records. The judge considered that access to the records of the bank and both registries of patrimonial solvency were sufficient to prove damage to her reputation.
According to the official Spanish Estate Markets Index made by TINSA there was a fall of 9.7% compared with the same month in 2008, showing 0.7% more than the preceding month where they fell by 9%.
The value of home properties on the Mediterranean coast dropped 11.5% while the major towns showed a drop of 10.2% by the end of the first trimester. Below that 9.7% figure, the value of home properties in metropolitan areas fell 9.6%. Meanwhile in other towns the value fell by 8.9% while the drop was 8.3% in the Balearic and Canary Islands.
Focusing on the accumulated falls of each sub index peak, it is worth mentioning the Mediterranean coast with a fall of 16%, as well as metropolitan towns with a fall of 12.6% and large towns reaching 12.3%.
Real estate property seizures ordered by Spanish first instance Courts reached 58,686 while the registered number in 2007 was 25,943, according to the General Counsel of Judicial Authority (CGPJ).