Thursday, March 14, 2013

EU's highest tribunal rules against Spanish foreclosure law

The highest judiciary authority in the European Union, the European Court of Justice (with see in Luxemburg), has ruled that the Spanish law of foreclosures is illegal because it does not give enough guarantee to citizens against abusive clauses in mortgage contracts. The ruling states that:

The Spanish normative, which impedes the judge with competency to declare abusive a clause of a mortgage contract to suspend the foreclosure procedure initiated through another path, is against the Right of the Union.

The Spanish law only allows to bring to court the issue of abusive clauses in mortgages AFTER the foreclosure has been completed. 

The high court has ruled on the question initiated by a mercantile court of Barcelona, which must decide on a demand by a citizen who was evicted by Catalunya Caixa (incidentally one of the Spanish banks "rescued" by EU funds). This citizen was evicted from his home in 2011 after he failed to meet his payments and demands that one of the clauses of the mortgage contract be declared null and therefore the foreclosure and eviction altogether. 

This is likely to cause chaos in the already surrealist Spanish mortgage scam scene. It should also affect the price of housing negatively, what is generally good for citizens and real economy and bad for banksters and their macroeconomic speculative mad dreams. 

It should block or at least delay most foreclosures and evictions, alleviating somewhat the dramatic burden on the shoulders of citizens who bought homes in the peak of the speculative bubble, still not sufficiently deflated. 

The European Court decisions have the highest ranking and overrule any state tribunals.

Source: Elkartzen Bilbo[es].

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please, be reasonably respectful when making comments. I do not tolerate in particular sexism, racism nor homophobia. The author reserves the right to delete any abusive comment.

Comment moderation before publishing is... ON