Spanish Business News

Jose Blanco, Spain’s development minister, tried to persuade U.K. investors today to purchase unsold vacation homes in a country where more than 50,000 home buyers have lost the legal rights to their properties.

“This is an ideal time to invest in Spanish real estate,” Blanco, 49, told reporters after his presentation. “There has been a significant drop in prices, while all the competitive advantages we offer still exist,” the minister said. He will deliver the same message to investors in France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Russia.

The campaign follows renewed calls from European Parliament members including Marta Andreasen, Roger Helmer and Michael Cashman to freeze some of the funds the European Union gives Spain until it resolves legal shortcomings that have stripped once-legal buyers of ownership rights. A non-binding 2009 report by the parliament’s petitions committee criticized the country for applying restrictions on coastal property retroactively and showing “judicial laxity” toward corruption and speculation.

“It’s inconceivable that anyone would want to invest in property in a country that has shown itself to be lawless when it comes to property rights,” Andreasen, a member of the U.K. Independence Party, said in a telephone interview. “Andalusia has 300,000 illegal homes alone. If we extrapolate that to the rest of Spain, a million homes is a conservative number.”

Read the full article at Bloomberg.com