January 2013. «The important thing is that they said they had money to rehabilitate it. We get rid of it, even if it's free. We rent it to them, we give it to them in concession cheaply, cheaply or whatever». Seven years later, in one of the intervened emails to the former Granada City Councilor for Urban Planning , Isabel Nieto, her words sound prescient. This is what is deduced from the expert report that has revealed millionaire deviations in the deferred sale of Casa Agreda in 2014, an operation that was being investigated and has just been archived —for the second time— by the Court of Instruction 9 of Granada .
This 16th-century municipal palace , located at the foot of the Alhambra, in the Albaicín neighborhood , was the subject of an obscure agreement in 2014 between the government team then governed by the popular mayor José Torres Hurtado —today implicated in various alleged cases of corruption—and a supposed Moroccan NGO based in Paris, AIDE Federation, an opaque entity whose representative was implicated in an arms trafficking case.
This association has only held a social act. That meeting took place in Morocco, and was attended by members of the municipal government , in 2015.
The only event organized by the opaque NGO in Morocco was attended by several mayors of the PP
Now, the case has been closed with a shelving, despite the evidence confirming that the City Council sold the property at a loss . In its day, the Torres Hurtado government team spoke of harassing the PP and even branded as racist those who questioned this sale operation, which has also been criticized by various groups in defense of the city's heritage. Finally, the transfer of the property was reversed by court order - the City Council has not yet requested its execution - and the Consistory is waiting for the Supreme Court to firmly confirm the return of ownership.
However, the Court of Instruction 9 of Granada has agreed to dismiss the case considering that no criminal offenses occurred. It is the second time that this procedure has been filed, but on this occasion, having knowledge of the expert report on the valuation of the property, which was received by the court last July and has not been disclosed to the parties until a few weeks ago : more than six months later. The appraisal document consists of a hundred pages in which the Taxo company , of the Tinsa group , analyzes the mansion in depth, considering its location and heritage value, with more than 3,000 square metersbuilt in two buildings: the original —it is not BIC, although it has local protection— and an adjoining building, from the mid-20th century, without special protection.
millionaire deviations
To make a reliable estimate, the appraiser took into account its possible partial use as a school, which would have fit due to its status as a religious facility, while theorizing about a possible housing development in the building without historical value. Thus, the document raises the market value of this property to 2,188,214 euros in 2014, which would be close to 3 million today . Previous appraisals carried out by the City Council itself, in 2008 and 2012, raised the value of Casa Agreda to 6 and 4 million euros, respectively. Figures ostensibly higher than the 1,637,638 euros with which the Granada City Council valued the property in 2014 .
That was the price set to exercise the purchase option after 40 years, since the Consistory tried to transfer it with a four-decade lease for a single payment of about 300,000 euros, that is, about 500 euros a month . According to the calculations of the experts, the annual price of the lease should have been 123,000 euros in 2014 —160,000 in 2019—, compared to the price established by the City Council. Without taking into account the possible revaluation of the rent, the difference would have been around 5 million euros, according to the estimates of the multidisciplinary team in charge of writing the report.
Compared to the valuation of the City Council, the sale prices deviated by about 6.5 million euros
The appraisal also revealed the basic negligence of the City Council of Granada in the valuation of the property in 2014. The Taxa expert highlighted that the then Director of Works of the Department of Urbanism, Manuel Lorente , one of the main investigated for his role in the alleged plot of urban corruption in the Consistory, he did not use the appropriate methodology : "The combination of several regulations is not usual or correct, much less the final calculation based on an average value of several methods."
The appraiser maintained that Lorente's calculation lowered the price by more than 200,000 euros: from about 1,865,000 to 1,637,638, a figure that also only "reflects the value of the land", without considering the buildings. In short, the real estate product deviated 13% from the market; construction costs, 33%; and the benefit of the promoter, by 80% . Regarding the preliminary rehabilitation project, estimated at almost 5 million euros, the report maintained that the valuation deviated between 20% and 100% , since it also stressed the impossibility of knowing the costs to which the Granada City Council was referring .
Around with the turns of a locked case
Despite the evidence of deviation in prices, the case of Casa Agreda has been archived again. The appraisal of the property was one of the last steps of the investigation that began being investigated by the Prosecutor's Office in 2015 and led to a case that hindered the urban planning of the previous popular mandate of former mayor José Torres Hurtado, along with the Nazarí case or the Serrallo case . Although that of Casa Agreda has been, perhaps, the one that has suffered the most judicial obstacles .
The Court of Instruction 9 of Granada, in charge of the case, decided to file the procedure in 2016, when the judicial appraisal had not yet been carried out . Finally, the Provincial Court of Granada ordered its reopening in 2018 , according to the criminal indications, even assuming the hypothesis that the transfer operation with rent to purchase could have actually been an attempt at money laundering , as denounced by the formation Let's go Granada, although without the intention of expanding the cause for the delay that could have been involved.
The procedure thus returned to the Court of Instruction 9, whose head, José Luis Ruiz Martínez , was accused by some parties of having interests in the matter due to his alleged friendly relationship with former councilor Torres Hurtado . For this reason, one of the complainants requested his recusal, without success. After the file and reopening of the case, the judge once again requested the expert appraisal of the property, which arrived at the courts last July, when José Luis Ruiz Martínez was no longer in charge: the Canary Islands is his current destination.
The new judge of the Court of Instruction 9, Rosa María Ginel , decided to abstain when she replaced Ruiz Martínez, as she was one of the magistrates who was in the Provincial Court at the time of ordering the reopening of the investigation. The case fell to the Court of Instruction 4, which has now ordered the dismissal of her in an order —against which there is an appeal— signed by the incumbent Antonio Moreno ; the same judge who agreed to file the alleged corruption plot in the Alhambra .
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