Alex Trelinski
BENIDORM City Council is facing potential bankruptcy after a court ordered it to pay €283 million plus interest as compensation to a family for the loss of building rights in the protected Serra Gelada Natural Park.
The ruling came from the Valencian Supreme Court(TSJCV) and is double the 2024 municipal budget of €141.6 million.
Appeals were filed by the family-run contractor Murcia Puchades Expansion SL and Urban Urban Villajoyosa 2000 SL after a lower court awarded them under €1 million.
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Interest will also have to be paid on top of the compensation dating back to December 2019 when the land was valued, meaning the council has been hit with a €330 million bill.
Benidorm mayor, Toni Perez, described the ruling as ‘nonsense’ and appealed for calm, stating that it was not ‘just a municipal level matter but should be a matter for the state’.
“This is perhaps the biggest punishment handed down to a city council and we will have to see what other sanctions have been imposed in other cases,” said Perez.
“We will see what possibilities there are to negotiate and also to publish the details of the entire history of this case from the beginning,” he added.
The TSJCV ruling is not final and can be appealed, with Perez making it clear at a Thursday news conference that his legal department are already on the case.
Asked about what this all means for Benidorm’s budgets, Perez said he would not ‘discuss the long-term economic consequences of the verdict’.
The TSJCV overturned a lower Alicante court decision that the Murcia Puchades family should get a much lower sum of €683,000.
The Valencian court took the view that the land had been previously been classified as urban land suitable for development back in the 1960’s.
Therefore it allowed a new assessment of its value which accepted what the potential developers wanted as compensation for not going ahead with the project.
The Murcia Puchades family had three plots totalling over two million square meters in the Serra Gelada
Their legal action started after Benidorm City Council voided urban planning agreements signed in 2003 between then-mayor, Vicente Perez Devesa and several companies.
The agreements were renewed twice in 2010 and 2013 by ex-mayor Agustin Navarro and left open an option to pay compensation to keep constructors out of ‘protected’ areas.
Toni Perez was not drawn into criticising the deals done by two of his predecessors.
