All companies dedicated to the ‘eviction’ of properties promise the same thing: to recover a house legally but much faster than a court would do it. What they do not explain or even deny on their websites is that their workers use criminal methods to achieve their goal: threats, coercion and even physical attacks that can rarely be documented. A new ruling from the Madrid courts has imposed fines of 360 euros on two employees of Bastión Desokupación who throughout 2022 threatened a woman who lived in the north of the city: “This is going to be unpleasant for you and for your children,” said the two convicted men during one of their visits to the home.
Bastión Desokupación is one of the many companies that rode the crest of the tidal wave created by Daniel Esteve, his Desokupa and the social alarm to seek their part of the business of releasing properties occupied, supposedly, irregularly. The promise is always the same: get the house back in a few days, much faster than a judge ever will. “Justice is very slow,” Bastión Desokupación laments on its website, where it promises to achieve its goal “always within the framework that justice demands.”
The promotion hides two things. The first is that the law has for years guaranteed the immediate recovery in a few days of an illegally occupied first or second home. The deadlines are lengthened when what is reported is not a crime of trespass but rather the occupation of an empty home, which does not constitute anyone’s home and which is sometimes owned by banks, investment funds or an individual who wants to recover possession. .
The second reality that this advertising hides is that the methods of some of these companies are not as legal as they want to imply. This is attested to by several sentences that condemn employees of Bastión Desokupación for different minor crimes for harassing, harassing and threatening families whom they want to evict in exchange for money. The last case, as elDiario.es has learned, was finally sentenced last summer by the Provincial Court of Madrid.
This case started in mid-2022 in an industrial area of the Madrid town of San Sebastián de los Reyes, when the owner of an apartment hired Bastión Desokupación to kick out a woman who had been living for two years with two children under the age of age and that, according to the ruling, he had stopped paying “two or three” monthly rent payments. Two company workers, one of them identified as the “head of operations,” began making visits to the home.
First they left a business card. Then the WhatsApp messages began without any type of threat. Finally came the ringing of the doorbell, the knocking on the door and the aggressive attitudes. “It’s enough to live off the story and then you go away to enjoy your vacation, to the best schools. Return the house to its owner, who has nowhere to go. Damn, you have more face than back,” they said on one occasion.
Amid claims that they were looking for a “friendly agreement,” the Bastión Desokupación employees tried to frighten the woman’s family. “This is going to be unpleasant for you and your children,” they once said. “This has just begun, so you’ll see how far you want to go. “Sooner or later we are going to catch you out.” The woman’s children, minors at the time, were inside the house.
The threats were also against their properties. “You’re not going to win for locks, let’s go see your handsome little car.” The sentence declares it proven that, throughout these months, someone changed the lock of the apartment and slashed the four wheels of his car, although the judges do not attribute it to the employees of Bastión Desokupación. They even went to their parents’ and sister’s house, says Justice, “to exert pressure and make themselves noticed, conveying to the tenant the message that they were present in various facets and places of her life.”
New conviction for a minor crime
The result of this judicial process, as elDiario.es has learned, is a conviction for both workers for a minor crime of threats, which carries fines of 360 euros. The Provincial Court of Madrid has confirmed the criminal sanction that an Alcobendas court imposed on both Bastión Desokupación workers after a quick trial. “The two appeals must be rejected outright as they were filed by those who did not have the capacity to do so,” explains Judge Valentín Sanz. The defense of both convicts, in contact with elDiario.es, has declined to make statements.
This is not the first sentence that criminally sanctions the methods of employees of this company. One of them, who responds to the initials of JEO, introduced himself as “chief of operations” of Bastión Desokupación. The other convict, ORC, began working shortly after for another company in the sector called Brigada Desokupa, protagonist of an illegal eviction attempt of a woman in Vallecas in the summer of 2023.
As revealed by elDiario.es, two Bastión Desokupación workers were sentenced in the summer of 2022 to pay a fine of 90 euros, in that case for two minor crimes of coercion committed in an illegal eviction in the Madrid neighborhood of San Blas. In that case, the judges explained that the “physical appearance” of the convicted persons contributed to the “alarm or concern generated in the victim.” People of “great corpulence, height” and “muscled”. The usual photo in the interventions of this type of companies.
A few months later, another sentence sentenced these same workers from the same company to pay another fine of 150 euros and compensation of another 350 euros for minor injuries. In that case, as proven by a Madrid court, the two “delivered several blows and a push” to a man who at that moment was leaving the house that, apparently, he was occupying illegally, while they demanded that he hand over the keys.
A fourth conviction for three Bastion employees came a year ago. They posed as experts and identified themselves as police officers, according to that ruling, to deceive the victim into allowing them to enter the house where he lived in Arganzuela with a deferred eviction order. The objective, according to the judge who sentenced the case, was “to deprive the complainant of the use of the home with the intention of breaking his will.”
Four sentences against employees of Bastión Desokupación that reveal the methods of the workers of some of the companies in this sector when they do not achieve their objectives and resort to deception, force or threats to “recover” a property. Although, as in the case of Arganzuela, what they are doing is trying to kick someone out of a house where they have judicial authorization to live.
#unpleasant #children #criminal #harassment #eviction #company #woman #children
