Showing posts with label Barcelona. Show all posts

Spanish property developer said Tuesday it will hold a raffle to unload 31 apartments near Barcelona

Spanish property developer said Tuesday it will hold a raffle to unload 31 apartments near Spanish property developer said Tuesday it will hold a raffle to unload 31 apartments near Barcelona which have been difficult to sell amid a collapse in the real estate market.Tickets for the raffle cost 50 euros (63 dollars) and they will go on sale on Wednesday, a spokesman for developer Grupo de Empresas Rob told AFP.The company hopes to sell 7,000 raffle tickets for each apartment which will be awarded, meaning it would raise 350,000 euros per dwelling.If the developer does not sell at least 6,500 tickets for a particular apartment, the raffle will not go ahead for that property and participants will receive a refund.The raffle, which will be supervised by a notary, will be held in the coming months, the spokesman said.
All of the apartments -- which are between 50 and 90-square metres (970-square feet) -- are all located on the same street in the Barcelona suburb of Santa Coloma de Gramenet.After a decade-long boom, Spain's property market began to slump last year due to rising interest rates, oversupply and tougher lending conditions introduced in the wake of the global credit crunch.Property sales declined 28.2 percent during the first nine months of this year compared with the same period of 2007, national statistics institute INE said last week.The drop in sales has led developers to come up with innovative promotions to try to sell properties.In October another Spanish developer, Salsa Immobiliaria, offered a one bedroom apartment to anyone who bought one of its four-bedroom townhouses near the beach in Terrazas de Miraflores on the Costa del Sol.In May a man who could not meet mortgage payments on his apartment near Madrid tried to organise a raffle to unload it but he had to call off the contest because he failed to get the proper authorisation.
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Roshan Jamal Khan detained in Spain

Roshan Jamal Khan was detained in Spain on January 19 and kept in jail since, accused of being an Al Qaeda-linked suicide bomber. Spain has not explained his crime. This despite the Indian Ministry of External Affairs writing to Spain in March first week that Roshan was “clean”.From her, it is difficult to get the story of how the ex-student of south Mumbai’s cosmopolitan St Xavier’s College, popular as a boxer, went on to be an olive trader before being picked up from a mosque in Barcelona and branded a terrorist.“I fear of repercussions on the children. The family name is at stake. Only my two eldest children know about his arrest. The four younger ones — between seven and 12 — don’t know,” she said.
And as Roshan goes about his routine in a Spanish jail 7,000 km away, his 16-year-old son Talha will be writing his SSC Physics exam on Monday.“My exams are near, but I’ll manage. I’m worried about Talha,” said teary-eyed 17-year-old Safiya, a first-year commerce student. “He’s upset. He wants to hear father’s voice.”The government, meanwhile, ran its cold, officious lines. “The embassy was given consular access to Roshan Jamal Khan, and two officials from the Indian embassy in Madrid went to meet this gentleman in prison,” said a senior Indian diplomat in Spain. “They have confirmed that he is indeed an Indian and is in good health.”
A Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson in Delhi just said: “We are in touch with the Spanish authorities.”
Meanwhile, brother Mehboob Khan shows some of Roshan’s certificates. “Shri Khan comes from a respectable family and... bears a good moral character,” says a certificate issued by Professor AA Kazi, St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, on November 7, 1981.A letter of appreciation issued by the American Embassy in Kuwait in 1994 reads: “Your professionalism and willingness to provide assistance... is sincerely appreciated.” (This was in connection with services Roshan Khan provided while with a Kuwait-based aviation company).Roshan’s younger brother Mehboob Khan, a BJP worker for 25 years, says he called Roshan two days after he was detained on January 19 in Madrid.“His cell was switched off and it continued being so for the rest of the week. I got worried and called his brother-in-law in Barcelona. He told us about the charges. Till then neither the Spanish authorities nor our authorities informed us,” Mehboob recalled. “I then started corresponding with the Ministry of External Affairs and the PMO, which told me they are looking into the matter. I offered to go to Spain but was told it was not required at this stage.”More than a month after Jamal’s detention, the family received a letter (dated February 25) from Sujata Mehta, Ambassador of India in Madrid, stating that two officials had met Roshan and he was being looked after well and that he had asked them to inform his family members in this regard. He also conveyed a message that “his family should await a resolution of the situation”.“That is what we are doing: waiting,” said Mehboob. Mehboob is preparing to go to Spain. “I have requested the embassy to help me with a visa. I will go to fight for my brother,” he said.Their father, Babu Peshgar Khan, who runs a dairy in south Mumbai, is in shock and refused to speak.
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Terrorist threat in Southern Spain (update)

Spain’s Pakistani community has grown from a few thousand residents a decade ago to about 70,000 today, as immigrants have been drawn to Spain by easy entry and to Barcelona’s Raval district by cheap rents. They have injected new life into the decrepit neighborhood, opening small businesses, but law enforcement officials say some have engaged in petty crimes like money laundering and credit card fraud.Pakistanis have also sent home millions of dollars through the informal system of money transfers, some of it financing extremist groups there, the officials add.
As the terrorism suspects congregated in the largely Pakistani neighborhood here over the past few months, they were joined by a young man who called himself Asim. He had come from the Pakistani borderlands where the leadership of Al Qaeda is said to have regrouped.
The suspects, he later told Spanish investigators, envisioned a wave of spectacular attacks: Coordinated suicide bombings would start in this city’s vast subway system and then sweep through Portugal, Germany, France and Britain if certain demands were not met.
Asim had been sent to Spain to be a suicide bomber, but he also was an informant for French intelligence working in the no man’s land of Waziristan in Pakistan. After he got word to his handlers of an impending attack, Spain’s military police swooped into the neighborhood of Raval in the early hours of Jan. 19 and arrested 14 men. Now the officials unraveling the case say it demonstrates the growing threat of terrorist activities migrating to Continental Europe from Pakistan.
The largely Pakistani cell formed quickly in Barcelona with support, and perhaps direction, from the tribal areas of Pakistan, the authorities said. According to the arrest warrant in the case, three suicide bombing suspects arrived in Spain within the last four months and the bomb making suspect had recently spent five months in Pakistan.
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