The Community of Madrid has tried to close the chapter on the controversial luxury penthouse acquired by Planifica Madrid with 224 pages of documentation. But the effect achieved has been very different from what Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s team sought. Because, although the file made public yesterday reconstructs in detail what happened from the moment the public company began negotiating the acquisition of the property until the regional government canceled the lease that had been planned to use it “as an office” and decided to put it up for sale, it leaves the main questions unanswered. Who really commissioned the purchase?; when was the decision made?; and why was that penthouse chosen and not another property? “They intended to overwhelm with information, but it backfired due to the number of unanswered questions that still exist,” summarize Más Madrid.
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The chronology left by the file begins on February 3, with a confidentiality agreement between Planifica Madrid and the previous owner of the property. It is the first document included in the documentation and already shows that there was a negotiation process for a possible sale. However, it is not recorded when that negotiation began nor does any earlier document appear that justifies the need to buy the property or that formally records a commission from the regional government.
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The Minister of the Presidency and president of Planifica Madrid, Miguel Ángel García Martín, stated yesterday in the Assembly that the company acted “within the framework of its powers and its normal asset management activity” and “at the request” of his Ministry. But that request does not appear anywhere in the file.
On February 13, an appraiser valued the penthouse at 6,242,884.10 euros. Two weeks later, Planifica Madrid signed a deposit agreement with the owner for 630,000 euros. The intermediation was carried out by Promora, a real estate agency specialized in the luxury residential market. On April 14, the sale was formalized for 6.3 million euros, to which 378,000 euros in taxes had to be added.
Up to that point, the file certifies the operation. What it does not certify is something as relevant as the reason given for carrying it out. The Community’s first explanation when El País uncovered the scandal was that the penthouse would serve as the president’s temporary office during the works on the Royal Post Office. However, that justification also does not appear in the purchase file. Just as there was no report at the time of acquisition that proved that need.
The documentation now provides a new and relevant piece. On July 2, almost three months after the signing of the sale, the Technical General Secretariat of the Ministry of the Presidency drafted a report to justify the lease of the property by the Community to Planifica Madrid. At this point, the report no longer speaks only of an office. In fact, it says quite the opposite because it defines the need to have an institutional property with “an area intended as a workplace” and “a rest and occasional accommodation area for authorities on official visits to the Community of Madrid or the authorities of the Administration themselves.”
The timeline is one of the issues that PSOE and Más Madrid have questioned: the purchase was closed on April 14, while the report justifying the need for the lease is dated July 2, “almost three months later.”
It is also relevant that the Ministry of Economy and Finance found that the property had a “physical configuration typical of a dwelling” and residential use. And that Planifica Madrid concluded that the use proposed by the Presidency was compatible with urban planning regulations. Therefore, the file does not contain a prior justification for its use as an office.
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The delegated auditor, in fact, warned that the adaptation of the property to the intended use “should have been sufficiently developed.” In her opinion, the documentation was limited to describing the property and its regime, without delving into the need, suitability, rent, expenses, or comparison with other buildings. However, the warning did not prevent the contract from going ahead.
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It was not until July 29 that El País published the existence of the purchase. And a few hours later, with maximum speed, the Community announced that it would sell the penthouse and that the funds would be allocated to the reconstruction of areas affected by the fires in the western mountain range. That same day, the Presidency informed the Ministry of Finance that, suddenly, the need that had motivated the lease had disappeared and the authorization was revoked.
The Community and Planifica Madrid then formalized the termination of the contract. The Administration never took possession of the property and, therefore, did not incur any financial obligation for the lease. The operation thus went, in barely 24 hours, from being presented as a purchase intended to meet an institutional need to becoming a property that had to be sold.
Planifica Madrid then accelerated the disposal. Its board of directors agreed to put the penthouse up for sale through a public offer. Two days later, the tender was published, with a starting price of 6,694,201 euros, almost 400,000 euros above the acquisition price, before taxes and other costs. The opposition has used this difference to accuse the Community of Madrid of “speculating” with the property.
But the exit operation has not worked either. The deadline to submit offers ended on September 7 and, when the envelopes were opened yesterday, there was none for the penthouse. The tender was declared void but Planifica Madrid has decided to keep the property for sale through an open award procedure. This
The outcome is not surprising for some Popular Party leaders consulted by La Vanguardia. “It was foreseeable that the process would be void,” admit PP sources, who attribute the result to the “rush to sell it to cover up a poorly planned operation from the start.”
Moreover, the sale has taken place under unusual conditions for a property of this nature. Potential buyers had to participate in a process for a dwelling whose operation had been surrounded by confidentiality and without an ordinary visit to the property being facilitated. The result is that anyone wanting to pay almost 6.7 million euros had to do so on a property that had already become a political and judicial hotspot, with doubts still open about its acquisition and use. The judicial investigation has been open since August in Madrid’s instruction court number 8, after the Prosecutor’s Office referred several complaints about the operation to that body.
After 224 pages, the main mystery remains the same as at the beginning: how the decision was made to buy that penthouse and who made the decision. The file allows reconstructing what happened afterward. But it does not fully explain what happened before.
