The descendants of the dictator Francisco Franco continue to make cash with their important real estate assets. Now it is the turn of the owner of a parking lot in the Madrid neighborhood of Chamberí. In parallel, Carmen Martínez-Bordiú, the dictator’s eldest granddaughter, has resigned from the only position she had left as administrator of family businesses.
The Francos make cash with a luxury hotel in Madrid after obtaining the guarantee of the State for their debts
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The community of owners of the garages located at Calle Ríos Rosas 47, in Madrid, has just received a letter informing them that the Francos, and specifically Jaime Martínez-Bordiú, “are processing the sale of Sociedad Proalrevisa (a company that exercises the presidency of the Community) to Mr. Pedro Gómez Gómez.”
The sale of that company is already listed in the Mercantile Registry. On May 18, the dismissal of, among others, Jaime Felipe Martínez-Bordiú himself as president and CEO of Proalrevisa was recorded, on whose board of directors was another regular in the Franco companies for decades, Javier Arenas Miralles.
Sarey Investments, a company belonging to a branch of the Reyzábal family, the Saralegui Reyzábal, also participated as a shareholder on the Proalrevisa board. This family made an enormous fortune during the Franco regime with cinemas, nightclubs and real estate in Madrid. Among them, the missing Windsor building, which stood not far from the Ríos Rosas parking lot.
Proalrevisa was until now domiciled in that parking lot, located in a very affluent area of the capital, and which is advertised on that central Madrid street with a nice sign with a very 50s feel. The property, as recorded in the Property Registry , is distributed over two underground floors and has almost 4,000 square meters of surface area. The garage has mixed opinions on Google. “The most expensive car park in the entire area, they charged me €7.50 for two hours that I was in Calle Ponzano”, says a review from two years ago.
The car park is located near Paseo de la Castellana, the Nuevos Ministerios Cercanías Renfe station or the Geominero Museum. It also has access from another Cristóbal Bordiú street, which, by chance, takes its name from an ancestor of the Franco family, a minister in the 19th century and father of the first Marquis of Villaverde.
As a result of the sale, the owner of the parking lot, Proalrevisa, which this media outlet contacted last Tuesday without receiving a response, has now had a new administrator, Esperanza Gómez. The buyer, Pedro Gómez, who could not be contacted, ran a Ford dealership in Leganés (Madrid) for years. There he has several companies dedicated to real estate business. Proalrevisa has become domiciled in a chalet in Valdepelayos, a residential neighborhood in that town in the south of Madrid, which is also the domicile of the company that appears as its sole partner.
Jaime Martínez-Bordiú “has been asked by the new owner to continue to be related to said Company for a while and to continue to hold the position of President”, indicates the letter to which this medium has had access.
Proalrevisa, the company that the Francos and their partners have just sold, was established in 1991. Its main activity is the “guarding and custody of vehicles”, according to its latest accounts, from 2022. Last year it reported profits of around 116,500 euros and, according to those accounts, formalized on April 25, it recorded real estate investments of 1.47 million. The amount for which its owners have sold Ríos Rosas 47 is unknown. But the capital gains would be in the millions in any case.
Rosary of companies
The Francos have been releasing real estate ballast for decades, in a process that accelerated after the death of Carmen Franco, the dictator’s only daughter, at the end of 2017. In 2019 they sold one of the parking companies of the Elliott vulture fund for 8.5 million clan, Estacionamientos Urme, owner of the parking lot at the Meliá Princesa hotel in the capital.
That same fund, with headquarters in the Cayman Islands, paid another 8.2 million that year for Atocha 70 Parking, in which the dictator’s eldest grandson, Francisco Franco Martínez-Bordiú, Marquis of Villaverde, appeared as administrator until 2014, who changed his surnames to put his grandfather’s first.
With Proalrevisa, another name disappears from the extensive rosary of clan companies, the result of the multimillion-dollar inheritance of the dictator’s only daughter. An investigation by El País estimated the assets of the companies of Franco’s grandchildren in 2019 at more than 100 million, with more than 400 properties in his name.
The sale of Proalrevisa has occurred in parallel with the recent dismissal of Carmen Martínez-Bordiú as a director of another family company, the real estate company Fiolasa SL, one of the companies with the most assets. The resignation of Franco’s eldest granddaughter, 72, was registered in the Mercantile Registry on August 8.
The so-called “granddaughter” had been appointed director of Fiolasa along with her brothers at the beginning of 2018, after the death of its until then sole administrator, Carmen Franco, at the age of 91. Weeks after that appointment, Martínez-Bordiú, Franco’s last ex-duchess (a title she inherited from her mother and which the Government eliminated in 2022 after the entry into force of the new Democratic Memory law), was sentenced by the National Court to pay more than half a million euros for evading income tax.
Better known for her appearances in the gossip press than for her professional activity (“I have lived my entire life without working,” she declared at the end of 2017 on the cover of Diez Minutos magazine), the only position that Carmen Martínez-Bordiú continues to hold. in companies in Spain is the sole administrator of Onarf SL.
Dedicated to public relations and apparently inactive for years (its latest accounts are from 2015), the Madrid City Council has just communicated to that company an order of enforcement and diligence for the accumulation of tax debt. The notification was published in the BOE just a few days ago, on August 24.
In addition to Fiolasa, the “granddaughter” appeared until 2021 on the board of another clan company, Sargo Consulting, recently absorbed by Fiolasa. In the latter, with more than 15 million in assets, the dictator’s youngest granddaughter, Aránzazu Martínez-Bordiú, 60 years old, has just been appointed CEO.
Álvaro Franco Guisasola, great-grandson of the dictator (he is the son of Francis Franco) and an engineer specialized in nanotechnology, has also entered as an advisor. The company has just carried out a capital reduction of 315,598 euros.
With Golden Martial
The operation of garages in Madrid has been an important business line for the Franco clan for decades. In March 2002, another of his companies, Oceans Eleven, bought another parking lot at number 359 Bravo Murillo street from the Progamallo firm, linked to the drug trafficker Marcial Dorado, the one in the famous photo on a yacht with the current leader of the PP , Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
Progamallo had acquired that property in 1998 for some 2.3 million euros of “illegal origin” and originating in Switzerland, as ruled by the Supreme Court in February 2015. By selling it four years after acquiring it, he obtained consideration from Oceans Eleven of 7.2 million (plus VAT), more than triple. But the sale was written for a much lower amount, less than 5 million. This allowed the Galician drug trafficker to stop paying 794,133.37 euros to the Treasury for Corporate Tax, according to the Supreme Court.
Oceans Eleven was then 100% owned by another Franco company, Centro de Agentes Unidos del Calzado Español, SL (Cauce SL), which a few years ago was sentenced by the National Court to pay the Treasury close to 2 million as a fee , penalty and interest, for the transfer in 2003 of a set of offices and parking spaces to another clan firm without paying taxes.
