The case has been in court since 2020, when a locksmith entered and threw the belongings of more than 50 years in the trash | “I would have preferred a flood, they have left me with no memories, with nothing,” laments the affected
Consuelo’s husband, 79, had recently passed away. So in December 2019 this woman left home from Cullera (Valencia) to pass the Christmas and the duel with his son Vicent, in Quart de Poblet. The covid and sadness made will pass the lockdown with his sonuntil April 2020. When he returned home he discovered that the bowler hat in the apartment had been changed and that it was empty. They had thrown away everything, their belongings and memories of the home that had been theirs for 50 years. First they thought they were squatters. Later they discovered that had been a vulture bottom.
Global Pantelleria, a subsidiary of the Cerberus vulture fund in Spain, sent a person to Consuelo’s house the week of Christmas Eve 2019. Their job was to issue a report verifying that she was not there. With that, a locksmith opened the door and a company emptied the living place. All extrajudicially, and without notifying the affected party.
That is what the investigative court number 6 of Sueca is investigating, which has accused a representative of Haya Real Estate (manager of the vulture fund) for these events. Consuelo has lived with her son for two years, and since then he takes pills for depression. Vincent too.
The affected person arrived at her house one day and, without prior notice, she was found with the lock changed and completely empty. She has done herself without a judge’s order, and this is recognized by the vulture fund in one of the emails it sent to the family, which is now devastated. “I would have preferred a flood. I have nothing left, the photos, the videos of my husband to listen to his voice, the clothes, the furniture… They have thrown away 50 years of my life and now I only have what I remember in my memory,” explains Consuelo as she cries.
It was hard for them to understand what had happened because their house, which was already owned by a bank, had been acquired by Cerberus and they didn’t know anything. The reality is that they had been dragging financial problems for years, and Consuelo stopped paying, but she had not been sued yet and the eviction process had not started. “I went to my son’s house with fear, but in court they told me that anything that happened to the house they had to notify me in time because I lived there.” But they didn’t notify her.
Cerberus acknowledges in an email that the process that followed was “extrajudicial”
They did not notify her or the judge. What the fund did was simply change the knob with an “out-of-court procedure.” This is how it says in one of the emails that they later sent to Vicent, where they acknowledged that they took over the house outside the law.
in the next mail they offered Consuelo to retrieve the keys to amend his mistake. But there was a condition they had to sign a paper rejecting any type of legal action Against them. The affected person rejected it because “that is no longer my house, there was nothing”, and with the help of the platform for those affected by the mortgage (PAH), they filed a complaint.
The case passed into the hands of Adelina Cabrera, an expert lawyer in housing rights from the El Rogle cooperative, who has been with him for two years. “A foreclosure has two phases; the first is the foreclosure, which changes the house to the name -in this case- of the vulture fund. And the second is possession of the home, having the house physically and being able to enter. The second is not it changes until the judge says so and sets an eviction date”, he explains. What is the problem? “No date had been given to take possession. That is the seriousness of the matter. What the vulture fund did is, from’motu propio’ recover the houses through illegal meansbefore a judge told him he could do it.”
who gave the order
the vulture background he sent a person to see if anyone lived there. It was three days during the week of Christmas Eve 2019. He collected the testimony of two neighbors and the administrator of the farm, and with this he concluded that the house was uninhabited for more than 6 months. They took over the house, left it empty and posted it on her website while Consuelo mourned and was confined with her son. She didn’t know anything.
The fund acknowledges in one of its messages to the family that this procedure is quite common, and that they have done it in more homes when they suspect that they may be empty. The fund manager dismisses it as “accelerating the judicial process”.
Global Pantelleria has 26,408 homes, which they bought from the Santander bank for 1,106 million euros in 2018
Right now the case revolves around finding out who gave the order to enter the house. But vulture funds are like ghosts, and rarely take responsibility, or at least manage to escape. The only defendant in the case is a lawyer with powers of Haya Real Estate, a housing package manager, who then managed the Cerberus portfolio.
“When we ask what they told us, it is that a computer system decides that and they don’t know how to answer us,” explains Vicent, who tried to find answers after what happened. In each email he sent, he was redirected to another department because “that one did not have the information”, the other department led to another, and finally to a paid telephone number.
“It’s a 901 of these that charge to call, but I called. And they told me that I had to contact them via email.” Vicent came to Valencia to appear in one of the very few physical offices of Haya Real Estate together with more PAH activists. The same; “They only serve those affected via email“. After several years he finds no answers or responsible.
The judge too has refused to investigate these companies to be able to know their apartments, with which, two years later, it is still impossible to know who gave the order to enter the house. “The case is very stopped, the only person they have found is a lawyer and she is not even from the fund, she is not responsible. What she says is that this process it was ‘automatic’, that nobody did it. You feel terribly powerless with these things, they are very big and we are two very small people,” laments Vicent.
“After two years the house is still closed”
Global Pantelleria is a subsidiary of the Cerberus vulture fund, which has 26,408 homes in Spain. He landed in our country on December 5, 2018, when he bought this huge package of houses from the Santander bank, for an amount of 1,106 million euros. The technique of these funds is to buy huge packages of debt in the form of housing, collect it or sell the houses, and then repay the money they had borrowed, in this case from Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas, among others. The term to repay the loan ends on March 24, 2024, according to a study by Manuel Gabarre, a researcher at the CODE Observatory against economic crimes.
Vicent and Consuelo are two normal people who face giants, and they have been hitting their heads against a wall for two years. “In the end, impotence takes over you. We are without energy to protest, and the only thing that happens is that we have stopped trusting the law. The feeling is that these companies can do what they want without consequences,” explains Vicent. He adds that when they lost their house, they only claimed to be able to get some of their things back, but later they found out that they had thrown it all away.
“I no longer have any memory of my father. The only thing I have left is in my memory”, says the affected person. He says that, although two years have passed, they are still in shock, and they add that, after all the ordeal, the house remains the same. With the lock changed. Empty.