On 3 February, 2014, I wrote my article about
the mounting problems for the Dutch Finance Minister and chairman of the
Euro-group Jeroen Dijsselbloem. In this article, I printed a list of blunders and less fortunate
actions, done by this chairman in distress.
The day after, I received an intriguing letter from a
reader in Spain, Jaafar Jalabi. Mr. Jalabi is the managing director of the Spanish construction and exploitation company "Parcelatoria de Gonzalo Chacón" (PGC).
Jaafar Jalabi wanted to know why I didn’t mention the turbulent
prelude to the nationalization of SNS Reaal in the list of unfortunate actions
of Jeroen Dijsselbloem.
Besides that, Jalabi stated that he had become the
victim of evidently slanderous accusations by the temporary managing director
of SNS Property Finance, Buck G.
He dearly wanted an answer to the question why the
board of directors SNS Reaal didn’t do anything to stop the slanderous (criminal)
lawsuits, which were filed against him. Especially as he had sent multiple warning letters to the
executives of SNS Reaal, that they didn´t have a case at all and subsequently
won all lawsuits that were filed against him and his company.
Here is the almost integral letter of Jaafar Jalabi:
Dear
Sir,
I
have been following your Blog for a while. I was wondering in your commentary
today why you did not mention the debacle of the nationalization of SNS REAAL
as another issue of concern for the Dutch Minister of Finance.
I
know that the current Minister of Finance formed in early 2013, the committee
to investigate the failure of proper supervision by the Central Bank of Holland
and the Ministry of Finance, of SNS REAAL, since SNSPF purchased Bouwfonds in
2006 and until the takeover by the Dutch State of SNS REAAL. However; and out
of direct private information that I have, I could prove that the current
Minister of Finance is not cleaning up Propertize B.V.[this is the new working
title for SNS PF – EL] fast enough.
Let
me introduce myself first, my name is Jaafar Jalabi and I am the managing director and a major shareholder of a Spanish company
called "Parcelatoria de Gonzalo Chacón" (hereafter: PGC) that
is involved in a serious dispute with a Spanish affiliate of Propertize B.V.
(formerly SNSPF) called PROCOM Desarrollos Urbanos (hereafter ¨PDU¨).
Propertize
B.V. fully controls PDU and has 2 members in the board of directors. PGC was a
co-developer, partner, and operator in a very successful shopping centre in
Spain called Madrid Xanadu and wanted to do the same project with PDU in
Valencia, Spain.
The
dispute involves a total of 4 lawsuits that were started by Buck G. and his
corrupt team in Spain back in 2010 in order not to pay PGC a contracted amount
of € 6.46 million in June 2011.
The
contract was signed back in 2005 in the presence of a Notary Public. PDU has
lost all 4 lawsuits including a criminal lawsuit that they filed against me in
2011. The damage to PGC and to me has been tremendous and I will seek
compensation through the courts in Spain.
What is not clear to me (and this is my
question to you) is the following: that Buck G. started all of this (before
going to jail) and thus has opened the door for criminal and civil actions that
I could take against the hierarchy of SNS REAAL, SNS Bank, Propertize and
possibly NLFI.
Why nobody took corrective measures in spite
of the fact that I wrote several letters to the top managers of SNS REAAL, SNS
Bank and SNSPF asking them to stop this conduct of tort?
I
would like to state clearly that the dispute is about a contracted payment to "Parcelatoria de Gonzalo Chacón" (PGC) of € 6.46 million that PGC was able to collect through the court system in Spain. However, in order to collect the payment, it suffered serious damage
particularly after PDU filed a criminal lawsuit against me that they recently
lost. Propertize has already paid € 8.06 million to the court (€ 6.46 million
principal that PGC had already collected
+ € 1.6 million as a provision for delayed interest and legal costs) and
I am sure that Propertize has paid millions in legal fees to its lawyers. I
will eventually ask the courts for criminal responsibilities and fraud of the
Propertize team and for damages that are in the many many millions of euros.
I
am sure that Propertize is full of such examples (please look at the English
version of the prospectus to raise € 4.056 billion guaranteed by the Dutch
State, page 24 under the paragraph titled Litigation or other… and on page 25
under the paragraph titled A Significant Portion of Propertize…). Continuing
futile legal fights that were started by Buck G. (may be for corrupt reasons)
will only exacerbate the damage that will eventually be borne by the Dutch tax
payer. I feel sorry for him and her!
I
have been following this file very closely and with my Dutch lawyers for the
past 3 years. If you are interested in any further information then do not
hesitate to contact me.
And yesterday, Jaafar Jalabi sent a second letter:
Second letter of
Second,
as you would expect, I have been following the issue of SNS REAAL, SNS Bank and
SNSPF now Propertize ver carefully and with the help of my Dutch Civil Lawyers. My civil
lawyers are kept up to date continuously and this is why I was in Rotterdam
yesterday.
Under
Buck G., and for suspicious reasons a series of lawsuits were started by PDU,
but highly influenced by SNSPF, the last of which was a criminal lawsuit
against me. The criminal lawsuit was dismissed earlier on this week and in a
form that is very definite.
Usually
when criminal lawsuits are dismissed in Spain they are dismissed provisionally,
something like 95 % of the dismissals are as such, in my case the dismissal is
in a form that is definite and that allows me to go criminally in Spain against
top people in Propertize, SNS Bank, and SNS REAAL.
So
far PDU have lost all civil and criminal lawsuits against me and in a very
condemning manner and at a huge cost to the Dutch tax payer which I have proof
of.
As
a matter of fact and purely through the courts, I was able to obtain some PDU
board resolutions that are very incriminating. I have proof that so far SNSPF
has accumulated losses of around € 175 million + in PDU in addition to the
SNSPF exposure in the now infamous shopping center in Zaragosa.
Third,
I know that both the FD reporters and the NRC reporters are following up on the
matter and I could be of extreme help to them in relation with the Propertize
exposure in Spain, as I have a very significant amount of documented
information.
I
have a team working for me whose job over the last 3 years and 3 months has
been purely PDU and SNSPF. I am more than happy to share the information with
whoever you think should get it as, as I said before I really feel that the
clean up in Propertize is not deep enough, or fast enough and it will cost the
Dutch tax payer more money.
Propertize
has recently issued in excess of € 4 billion notes that are guaranteed by the
Dutch State, should this not be better scrutinised by the public and for the
sake of the public!
For Buck G., I only use his first name and initial, as
this is the habit in The Netherlands. Interested readers, however, will not
have much difficulty to acquire his full name.
Further, I checked the credentials of Mr. Jaafar Jalabi, as well as
his company Parceletoria de Gonzalo Chacón, and I also checked Jalabi’s referral to Madrid, where his company would
have worked in cooperation with others to build the Xanadu shopping centre. All
the information that Jaafar Jalabi supplied to me seems to be genuine and right.
 |
| Mr. Jaafar Jalabi Owner / Managing Director of Parceletoria de Gonzalo Chacón Picture copyright of: Ernst Labruyère Click to enlarge |
What I print here is Jalabi’s side of the story.
As I am not a real journalist, who is doing this work
for a living, I am not in the position to thoroughly check both sides of the
story. However, everything about this story by Jaafar Jalabi seems impressive and genuine.
It undoubtedly sets the impression that SNS Property Finance (now Propertize
BV) has acted like a cornered cat during the last years, when it tried to
recover some of its Spanish investments gone awry.
Nevertheless, if Buck G. feels obliged to respond to
these accusations, please let him feel free to get in touch with me, through
the email address in my profile. I want to say to him, however, that he must
have a darn good story, as the accusations towards Jalabi and his company have
seemingly been slashed by the Spanish civil and criminal courts, as being false
and unjustified.
Now I will try to give an answer to the urgent and
justified questions of Jaafar Jalabi, which he put in the red and bold text in the first
letter. I summarized those to the following two questions:
Why
did Buck G. started these false accusations against me, even if this could lead
to legal actions against him and his company?
Why
didn’t the executive management of SNS PF and SNS Reaal stop him? Or perhaps
even De Nederlandsche Bank or the Dutch Finance Minister?
With respect to the first
question, there is only one answer in my opinion:
Buck G. had rigged a team, consisting
of himself and a few befriended and probably very well-paid ‘hotshot’ lawyers.
Such teams have to fight some battles and deliver something, in order to
justify their high expenses and – as a matter of fact – their very existence.
Therefore I suspect that Buck
G. and his team have chosen a few Spanish companies to fight legal battles with,
just for the purpose of it. Spain is far away and they hoped that the ‘communis
opinio’ in The Netherlands would be that ’the Spaniards were wrong and SNS was
right’.
They probably hoped also that
the “pomp and circumstance” around such legal battles would generate sympathy
and understanding among the supervisors in The Netherlands and the Dutch
population: “Well, at least these guys
are fighting for every cent of their investments”. Image is everything in
the banking business!
Thus, they took for granted the
risk that they could lose all cases, probably, as the benefits of FIGHTING these
battles were probably bigger than the burdens of LOSING them.
People have to realize that SNS
Reaal was in a very awkward position in those days. The losses coming from
Property Finance were mounting through the roof and the DNB had finally come
out of its micro-prudential ‘hibernation’, after the fiasco’s with ABN Amro,
Fortis, Icesave and DSB Bank. This meant that time was running out for SNS
Reaal.
Besides that, SNS Reaal hoped
at the time, that they could ditch SNS Property Finance in a so-called bad
bank, so that SNS Reaal could go on without it. If SNS Reaal would have
accepted its losses without a (legal) fight, they might have lost the sympathy
of the supervisors and their willingness to cooperate with their plans.
And the answer to Jalabi’s second
question is:
The executive management of SNS
Reaal could have had the same reasons as Buck G. Not giving the Spanish losses
up without a legal fight, ‘for the audience’.
One more thing: before Buck G. had
been arrested on allegations of fraud, he had been a very well respected ‘banker
turned businessman’. I remember that some colleagues of mine, who had personally
known Buck G., hardly could believe that he was accused of fraudulent
behaviour. The news hit them like a hammer.
I guess that Buck’s reputation in
those days and – again – the argument that Spain is so far away, has stopped
the SNS Reaal executive management from really digging into Jalabi’s written arguments
and objections.
Even the loss of the first legal
cases against PGC will probably not have changed their mindset, that they had
a genuine case against this construction company. Probably, they have thought
something like “the Spanish justices have presumably been biased against SNS
Reaal”. People know how such things work.
At the time, when Buck G. was
arrested, it was probably too late to stop the whole legal battle from
unwinding…
And the Dutch Finance Ministry
and DNB? They have probably had a race against the clock in order to save SNS
Reaal, in which there was no time to dig into legal matters like this case.
This was probably the reason that they let these legal cases continue,
unfortunately.
I have gotten in touch with
Jaafar Jalabi again: if he sends me some interesting information and leads, I will
definitely write a follow-up story on this extremely interesting case.
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