Bankruptcy threatened Malaga Palms after Martínez’s off-plan property deals on Costa del Sol crumbled following the group’s collapse with buyer’s deposits held in escrow accounts disappearing into a legal black hole. British and Spanish investigators backed by a team of forensic accountants were trying to unravel the thousands of cross-border transactions related to complaints from those who had lost their money in Spain.
Transactions linked to Malaga Palms were a complex pattern of movements between Gibraltar, the UK, Spain, and the Caymans. It was difficulty to say how much had been lost, where and by who, but the combined losses were expected to run into hundreds of millions.
Malaga Palms Development Ltd., was one of many joint-venture companies sponsored by Grupo Martínez Construcciones to promote its new urbanizaciónes. The joint-venture company had been established in Gibraltar in 2003, at the same time as Palm Villas Ltd., a £100 off-the-shelf Gibraltar limited company owned by promoters David Jameson and Patrick Halfon. Through slick marketing and a network of sales agents, financial advisers and lawyers, Malaga Palms had been successful in selling up-market apartments and villas on the Costa del Sol to a mixture foreigners — for the most part Brits.
Business had thrived until the crisis reared its ugly head. Malaga Palms’ ambitious urbanizaciónes were hit when financing dried-up almost overnight then Martínez collapsed and their sites abandoned half built.
There was little hope the thousands of prospective owners, who had made deposits for unbuilt or half built properties, would ever get their money back. It would take years, if ever, of legal wrangling to track down the funds, to untangle the mountain of cross border legislation, and to overcome an almost insurmountable barrier of language and cultural differences.
Jameson’s home was in Biarritz, where with his associate he had established a real-estate company in 1998, specialized in selling up-market homes and property investments to expatriate Brits living in France and Spain.
Suave, elegant and charming, Jameson owned an impressive 17th century manor twenty kilometres from Biarritz and a collection of fine cars. He also owned a luxury motor yacht moored in the Hendaye marina and was seen as a successful businessman, rumoured to have made his money in the City, by those who knew him both in the local and expatriate communities in the south-west of France.
Jameson had arrived in France from London in 1998. However, he had not been a financier as he let on. He had in fact been born in Dagenham and dropped out of school at the age fifteen, then after working for a short time at the Ford motor plant had drifted from one job to another looking for something that measured up to his ambitions. His good looks and easy manner got him a job as a junior sales assistant at Burtons Tailors on Romford High Street.
Cultivating his accent and with his experience in made to measure tailoring he landed a job as a sales assistant at Crombie & Sons, an old and reputed City purveyor of gentlemen’s bespoke apparel and accessories. Little by little Jameson acquired a veneer of culture and worldly knowledge by rubbing shoulders with the firm’s customers, mainly wealthy investors, bankers and brokers.
Mimicking his customers’ style he made new friends whom he told he was a men’s fashion stylist and took to living beyond his means. When the firm’s management began to note costly stocks of fine textiles were missing the police was called in and Jameson, feeling the heat, was hurriedly forced to quit the City.
It was late spring when he arrived in Biarritz at the wheel of a Jaguar, third hand, and to all appearances a well spoken and elegantly dressed young English gentleman. There, when looking for a place to live, he met Simon Halfon. Faced with much the same difficulties they quickly realized that their respective talents, if put together, could be used to make a living from the relatively large and financially affluent British expatriate community present in the south west of France.
Halfon, a Parisian, whose pieds-noirs parents had arrived in France from Algeria after independence, spoke poor English; however he was clever with money — other people’s money. He was not blessed with good looks, he was what many would have described as somewhat untidy, a slightly greasy air and rather overweight, not exactly the kind of man suspicious English retirees would trust with their savings in a foreign land.
Jameson, in appearance, was the opposite to Halfon. Together they made a perfect team and were soon in the business of deftly separating wealthy but naïve expatriates from their money. Jameson was cool, more concentrated. Halfon, though he had a sharp business sense, suffered from what some people called a compulsive mobile disorder, he seemed to believe he could control the world via his mobile phone. What was going on elsewhere often seemed more important than the business at hand. At times he lost all sense of proportion taking an inconsequential call from Paris or Nice, whilst those present who were put on ice as he camped his master of the universe role.
It was the beginning of the property boom, business in the UK was looking up, Tony Blair had just been elected. There was a new spirit in the air and people felt it was either time to own a second home in France or Spain, or retire to a place in the sun.
Jameson bought the manor with a hefty bank loan cleverly negotiated by Halfon with a fraudulent declaration. It was the perfect place to invite perspective clients, thirty kilometres from Biarritz International Airport, with daily Ryanair flights from Dublin and London. The manor, full of history and character, was set in five acres of lush parkland, renovated and furnished in grand style. It was complete with all modern facilities, three magnificent reception rooms, seven bedrooms, five with ensuite bathrooms, a wine cellar, a swimming pool, a coach house and dependencies, and a golf driving course complete with an impeccably trimmed green.
Halfon let it be known very discreetly that Jameson boasted a title, explaining he declined to use out of modesty. It went of course with his image; a wealthy well connected Englishman of private means, connected to the property business, living the good life nearby chic Biarritz.
Initially Jameson’s investors were wealthy British residents in the Dordogne region of France, to the east of Bordeaux, a popular tourist destination for discerning visitors and where there was a long established British community. It was when the property boom really got underway the two partners spread their wings setting up companies in Andorra and Gibraltar to cash in on the boom of dream homes across the border in Spain.
The crisis abruptly changed everything. Jameson was in the sights of the Brigade Financiere following complaints from buyers who had put cash deposits on homes in the different developments promoted by Malaga Palms. However, no incriminating evidence was found, initial investigations showed the company was a legitimate business established in Gibraltar, and all transactions had been carried out either in Spain or indirectly through front companies on the Rock.
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