The head of the Court of First Instance number 70 of Madrid has decreed that 564 assets of the Pazo de Meirás remain in this place, in deposit under the custody of the State, until the lawsuit over their ownership is ended.
The magistrate has accepted the precautionary measure requested by the State Attorney, on behalf of and on behalf of the General State Administration and the National Heritage Administration Council, after the hearing held on November 25 to decide on this request, pending that it be resolved whose property it is: the State or the Franco family.
At that hearing, the Xunta de Galicia and the Concello de Sada (a Coruña municipality where the pazo is located) adhered to the precautionary claim of the State Attorney’s Office, while the Franco family opposed the claim.
Now the judge explains that, having analyzed the arguments of the parties, “the credibility and real consistency of the well-founded fear expressed by the State Attorney’s Office in relation to the loss of their right to effective protection should be recognized if the requested measure is not agreed.” “, with the consequent danger that the future sentence on the property will be without effect.
It underlines the “special characteristics” of the goods, which “can express the feeling of a state community, and also regional and local in accordance with the implicit cultural postulates in our 1978 Constitution.” “It is not a question of common or ordinary movable property but of pieces of extraordinary value that, even beyond the quantitative estimate in legal transactions, can be assets of the Historical Heritage and Documentary Heritage,” he adds.
The judge affirms that not only are the requirements for this purpose met, but also that “there are no other less burdensome measures that have the same effectiveness as the one now sought.”
Last September, the State Attorney’s Office filed a new legal claim in which it claims another 564 assets of the Pazo de Meirás, which is being processed in the courts of Madrid because the norm establishes that, in a matter of movable assets, they are competent judicial bodies corresponding to the domicile of the defendant, in this case the Franco family.
The State claims ownership of 564 assets that were not included in the original claim, in which it obtained ownership of the pazo itself and, in execution of the judgment, of nearly fifty assets, which the court considered attached to the property.
The demand included the precautionary measure that the assets remain within the pazo and in the Administration’s deposit until the court decides on the merits.
The magistrate in which the matter fell denied that, as requested by the State Attorney’s Office, an “unheard of part” precautionary measure be issued, that is, without listening to the Franco family, and set a public hearing for October to decide on it, which was eventually discontinued and is now being held.
