The Supreme Libra to Blackstone to sell to 40 families at the same balance price that bought them from Ana Botella

New varapalo for those affected by the sale of public housing to the Blackstone Buitre fund. The Supreme Court has failed against 40 families living in floors that the Madrid City Council of Ana Botella sold to the Buitre Fund in 2013 and that had demanded to exercise their right of retraction and preferential acquisition collected in their contracts: that is, buy the homes in which they lived rent at the same balance price that the real estate giant obtained, for just over 50,000 euros in this case.

Although a sentence of the Provincial Court had already proved the families in 2021, the Buitre fund appealed this decision and the high court is right, considering that the houses, then owned by the municipal housing and land company (EMVS) were sold in block. According to the technical cabinet of the First Chamber, this is one of the few assumptions “in which the exclusion of preferential acquisition rights” would proceed, which had been collected in the rental contracts.

This is not the first sentence that the Supreme Court dictates around the right of retracting of those affected by this alienation of almost 2,000 public homes from Madrid to an investment fund. Last year the same Civil Chamber proved four tenants from another block of the center of Madrid because, where appropriate, the requirements marked by the urban lease law were given to force Fidere, formerly Blackstone, to offer them the sale at the price at which they were bought at the Madrid City Council of Ana Botella: that promotion had not been sold whole, with several homes and up to 44 places of parking.

In this new case, with more than 40 families claiming their right to retract, the supreme fails in the opposite direction because it understands that the EMVs did sell all the houses and parking spaces that it had in that block. “It included all the units of which the municipal housing company was a holder in each building at the time of the transmission, all the homes of which the seller owned in that concrete building,” he explains.

The Supreme Court rejects that the sale of more than 1,800 euros that perpetrated the Consistory that Ana Botella then directed. “That this sale is part of another broader operation (multiple real estate promotions or buildings) is indifferent to these purposes, not preventing the law,” Zanja.

In 2013, the EMVS sold to Blackstone a total of 1,860 homes, 1,797 garage and 1,569 storage rooms, belonging to 18 promotions built under different public protection regimes. The operation, ordered by the then mayor Ana Botella, is the great example of the public housing diversion to private hands of recent years in Spain. The Court of Auditors condemned the ex -regidor to pay 25.7 million euros in his pocket, which then the prosecution revoked by two votes against one. In his favor he had two directors proposed by the Popular Party: who was Minister of Justice in the first government of José María Aznar, Margarita Mariscal de Gante, and José Manuel Suárez Robledano.