A subpoena is set to be served for Colin Thomas, of Town Hill, to appear in Madrid as a class action lawsuit against Spanish developer Ricardo Miranda Miret continues to rumble on in an effort to recover money on behalf of dozens of Ocean View Properties (OVP) victims.<\/p>\n
The criminal claim for fraud and misappropriation of funds was lodged in a Madrid court last year and included Mr Thomas and other directors of his firm.<\/p>\n
The prosecuting lawyer is seeking more than \u00a36.5 million in damages for 70 claimants.<\/p>\n
The firm took deposits worth around \u00a380,000 each from British investors, but much of the cash disappeared as the homes failed to materialise, it is alleged.<\/p>\n
Antonio Flores<\/strong>, the Spanish prosecuting lawyer from Marbella-based firm Lawbird<\/strong>, said: \u201cWe have requested that Colin Thomas specifically is summoned and quizzed.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t believe OVP knew anything about what was going on but they will be forced to talk in court.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was a scam of huge proportions. It has the potential of becoming one of the biggest property scams, as none of the developments will be built.\u201d Mr Thomas\u2019s company was behind a number of successful enterprises but ran into difficulties when it became involved as an agent for Spanish developer Ricardo Miranda Miret.<\/p>\n More than a thousand British investors who paid \u00a345 million for off-plan overseas property developments have lost their money after the firm was formally dissolved in 2009 with the appointment of liquidators Grant Thornton.<\/p>\n The Madrid court claims are linked with developments that never materialised at the Estepona Country Club on the Costa del Sol and Punta Perla, in the Dominican Republic.<\/p>\n This comes after the Mail revealed that The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and Staffordshire Police would take \u2018no further action\u2019 following the collapse of OVP.<\/p>\n Last year, the Mail also revealed that 50- year-old Mr Thomas was banned from being a company director for nine years after an Insolvency Service investigation revealed that he had pocketed almost \u00a314 million despite the firm being insolvent.<\/p>\n The findings also showed that his firm took \u00a323 million from customers for a Spanish development that it did not own, did not have a building licence for and never undertook any construction work on.<\/p>\n Despite efforts by the Mail, neither Mr Thomas nor his advisors were unavailable for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A YOXALL businessman looks set to be called to appear before courts in Spain over an alleged multi-million pound overseas property scam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[58,59,11],"class_list":["post-727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lawbird-in-the-media","tag-antonio-flores","tag-lawbird","tag-ocean-view-properties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=727"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1295,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/727\/revisions\/1295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lawbird.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}