Spanish banking system accepts 15,826 houses as debt payment in 2012
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E-mail Xinhua, May 11, 2013
The Spanish banking sector repossessed 39,167 houses as the result of people's inability to maintain their mortgage repayments, the Bank of Spain reported on Friday.
Of those repossessions, 15,826 houses, or about 40 percent, were accepted in return for the respective banks cancelling the rest of the buyer's debt, while 14,165 of the total 39,167 repossessions were first homes.
Among first homes, 83 percent of the repossessions were made without people inside, while 2,405 evictions were carried out when families still were there, with 355 cases requiring the police intervention.
The process of repossession writing off debt is one of the most important demands of the Platform of those affected by mortgages (PAH) as many families in Spain have been in the past evicted from their homes with the banks still requiring them to pay the remainder of their pending debt.
A handful of cases at the end of last year and the beginning of 2013 even saw some suicides among people about to lose their homes, which created social alarm in the country.
With the new process, which is included in the Code of Best Banking Practices, passed by the government in March 2012 and signed voluntarily back banks, those families unable to pay their mortgages can deliver their house as a payment and the rest of the debt is written off.
In November 2012 the government passed a measure to suspend evictions for two years for the most vulnerable families and created "a fund of houses" with cheap rental to those who had already been evicted.
Meanwhile this May the regional government of Andalusia (La Junta) went a step further and announced a new measure that will allow them to temporarily confiscate houses whose families are about to be evicted from the bank carrying out the eviction and use the building as social housing.
Thursday saw the European Commission (EC) slam this new measure could disagree with the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) passed for Spain to receive the bailout for its banks.
President of Andalusia Jose Antonio Grinan said on Friday that "it is not logical that nobody says anything when a nationalized bank pays its executive director an 88 million euros (114 million U.S. dollars) of pension and on the contrary this social decree could be refuted."
He added that if Europe thinks like that "Europe is not worthwhile." Endi
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