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Bancaja Habitat bought land with an overprice 50 times higher.

False valuations, fraudulent acquisitions of assets and irregular transfers of hundreds of millions of Euros. These are some of the points included in the lawsuit filed by the Banking Restructuring Fund (Frob) against former managers of Bancaja and Banco de Valencia and the business man Ramón Salvador. According to it, Bancaja Habitat would have paid an overprice 50 times higher in order to acquire land not intended for building from the accused business man.

“Several million Euros have been paid for plots that had nearly no value, or 98% lower than the one included in the deeds, due to the fact that they had been valued as perfectly usable”, the lawsuit declares. “Most of the acquired assets were subject to the compliance with the building plans, the approval of building and subdivision projects or they were land not intended for building pending to be part of a Housing Development Partial Plan”, the document drafted by the lawyer appointed by Frob, Carlos Gómez-Jara, adds.

(…) The Frob demands that all the accused should pay a joint bail of 226 million Euros, based on the presumed losses inflicted on Bancaja and Banco de Valencia.

The lawsuit also denounces the existence of “false valuations” in operations between the Valencian group and Ramón Salvador.

(…) The Fund also denounces that some of the operations agreed between Salvador and the Valencian institutions were carried out without being approved by the board of administration of the bank and the savings bank.(…)

The lawsuit insists that these presumed irregular activities are even more serious as they took place when the real estate bubble had already burst. It also adds that “it is even more surprising that some of these operations took place the same year that Banco de Valencia was being placed in administration of the Bank of Spain”. (…)

Source: Expansión