Julián Muñoz (El Arenal, 1947 – Marbella, 2024) was mayor of Marbella for only 15 months. He was appointed in May 2003 by Jesús Gil and dismissed from office on the orders of his mentor in August 2004, after winning the municipal elections held three months earlier with more than 50% of the vote. This was the time when he signed urban planning agreements like a madman, like an automaton. “Even on the bonnets of cars,” he said years later.
It is these agreements and licenses, issued despite obvious illegalities and often with hidden money, that still purge the city in the form of pending buildings, disputes and debts, in addition to an image etched in the collective imagination. The City Council has recognized in his favor some 500 million euros of final convictions for corruption, as stated in April by the legal advisor, Francisca Caracuel. In 15 years, he has barely managed to recover 10% and, a few months ago, he launched a public tender open to lawyers and detectives who could follow the money trail.
Muñoz’s shadow on the city goes far beyond the year he was mayor. Back, because his performance in Gil’s governments since 1991, first as a ranking councilor and then as deputy mayor, extends his role into the 1990s. Muñoz was Gil’s “right-hand man,” as the tycoon called him, until he wanted to fly alone.
Towards the future, its influence is projected because it will weigh on the city for decades. Also because the image of Marbella continues to suffer from the shame of those years: the money in the garbage bags, Isabel Pantoja’s apartment, the crossed accusations of golf.
Today, many continue to associate Marbella with corruption. The lifestyle and successive scandals of the family of the current mayor, Ángeles Muñoz, whose husband and son-in-law were prosecuted by the National Court for an alleged case of international drug trafficking and money laundering, contribute to this. Also, during his two-stage mandate (2007-2015 and 2017-2019), the heavyweight left by Jesús Gil and his disciples: Julián Muñoz and Marisol Yagüe continued to be dragged.
A city outside the law
In Marbella, more than a thousand constructions are illegal. The casuistry is varied: small single-family homes, large buildings capable of blocking the sun, gas stations or the mansion bought by Antonio Banderas were built outside the law, violated in various ways: some buildings were too big, others were built on land for public use, others on undeveloped land, some on the beach.
At that time, it didn’t seem to matter too much. The licenses and agreements were often signed by Julián Muñoz, who, in the Goldfinger trial (the reclassification in exchange for 2.7 million euros of the land where Sean Connery had his house), assured that he had signed without knowing anything, only because the person in charge, Gil, or the mastermind of the plot, Juan Antonio Roca, said so.
This is how the Belmonsa building was born, a 12-story mammoth that cast Carmen Suárez’s house into the shadows. Over time, the courts ruled in favor of the woman: not only did they declare the building permit null and void, but Julián Muñoz, among others, was sentenced to a year in prison for urban prevarication in the concession. But the building that Suárez spent half his life fighting against is still there and will probably never disappear. Some of its apartments are sold for half a million euros, although the transfers are usually left undocumented so that, if necessary, the buyer can claim that he bought in good faith, despite the fact that everyone knows about the Belmonsa case and the building is illegal.
A different fate befell La Gaviota, the beachfront home that Antonio Banderas bought from the television network Encarna Sánchez in 1997. The house was built partly on public land thanks to an illegal license granted in 1995. The actor fought the neighbors in court, which upheld the illegality and ended up demolishing the house last summer.
What to do with illegal licenses
In these post-Gilism years, the actions of the City Council led by Ángeles Muñoz oscillated between the attempt to regularize the excesses and the deliberate desire to ignore them. In 2010, the mayor approved a new general plan that, in practice, wiped the slate clean. It quantified 1,009 licenses granted between 1991 and 2006 as “not suitable for planning”, the majority of which had been annulled since 2004 after the Junta de Andalucía challenged them, and proposed an à la carte amnesty based on a compensation system for the municipality. This lasted five years: in 2015, the Supreme Court concluded that a PGOU was not the mechanism to remedy the illegalities of the past and brought the situation back to square one.
Since then, the City Hall has been dragging its feet to avoid suffering the consequences of this urban planning à la carte. For most of the buildings, there is no problem in turning a blind eye, because no one is demanding that legality be restored. But there are another handful, more than a dozen, whose neighbors are asking for something, demolition or compensation, and the courts are obliged to grant it to them.
The case that went furthest is that of a house in Artola, which this media reported on last April: in this case, the magistrates of the High Court of Andalusia grew tired of the legal tricks of the Consistory to delay the execution of a demolition order, they fined the mayor 1,000 euros and asked the public prosecutor to open an investigation for disobedience, as this media revealed.
After a year of back and forth from the Supreme Court (because the mayor was seized), the Marbella prosecutor closed the case, correcting his initial criteria and contradicting the magistrates, who wrote in a document: “In fact, the City Council “It does not seem to understand that a demolition was ordered to make the sentence effective and that this Court has the obligation to execute what has been judged.
The City Council usually puts forward an argument: the volume and importance of the buildings in suspense are such that, if it complies with the only ten that have ruled against the TSJA, it would have to pay 246 million euros in compensation. It would mean the bankruptcy of Marbella, the return to the manager, the catastrophe.
“This represents an impact, in fiscal and liquidity terms, that is impossible to structure for compliance purposes,” the Treasury Department said in a late-2021 report, adding to this figure Malaysia’s significant volume of deferred debt estimated at €284 million at the start of the year. The city council is therefore informing the judges that it simply cannot pay.
Looking for money
In the meantime, look for resources elsewhere. The easiest thing is to reactivate construction, but there is a problem: Marbella is a city with already filled developable land. The solution: incorporate rustic land into the equation, taking advantage of the path opened by the new Andalusian Land Law (LISTA) that allows hotels and tourist accommodation to be built, as well as industrial, leisure or commercial facilities, on rustic land. 32 million of common rural land that will be added to the 54 million of urban land. It will be the first municipality in Andalusia to take advantage of this possibility.
The other way is to look for the looted money. In April, he received good news from the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in the dispute he had with the Treasury. The Tax Administration planned that the 12 million euros from the sale of Juan Antonio Roca’s assets will be used to reduce the municipality’s tax debt, which will be paid in installments that will extend until 2052.
During these years, 55.7 million euros have been recovered for the municipality (about six million, in fines, are still awaiting an agreement for transfer to the municipal coffers) and assets valued at almost 8.5 million euros, according to municipal sources. But it is much more hidden.
So the website for selling seized goods is reborn from time to time. Or that the City Hall launched a call for tenders last spring to recruit a team of lawyers and detectives to trace the trail of corruption money. “The Legal Department has tried to promote the execution of these sentences in various ways; but what has been achieved so far is rather meager,” we can read in the report justifying the contract.
The municipality was willing to pay 450,000 euros to anyone who searched for the stolen money for five years, until 2029, but no one wanted to take on the task. Erasing the shadow of corruption in Marbella is too difficult a task. Julián Muñoz himself died with 46 million euros and the money from his last television appearances was seized.
