The European parliament’s Petitions Committee, a Spanish government spokesman attracted widespread condemnation for Spain’s failure, over many years,

The European parliament’s Petitions Committee, a Spanish government spokesman attracted widespread condemnation for Spain’s failure, over many years, to act on extensive property scams, affecting British and other buyers of Spanish holiday and retirement homes.In the meeting, Alicia Paz, Director General for Sustainability of Coastal Regions, asserted that the Spanish Coastal Law, implicated in many of the forced expropriations of seaside property, was intended to preserve Spain’s fragile coastal environment. But she failed to explain how such a law could be applied retrospectively, how it could be used to deny basic property rights to Spanish and foreign investors who had bought property on the basis of binding contracts and land registration, and why the expropriations seemed to apply to private householders, but not to hotels and major developments.