Judicial setback for the Francos: the court prohibits them from removing the 564 assets they claim from the Pazo de Meirás

The descendants of the dictator Francisco Franco They have suffered a new judicial setback this Friday. 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 the custody of the State, until the lawsuit over their ownership is put to an end.

The legal services of the State had requested that the assets remain within the Pazo and in the Administration’s deposit until the courts decide who their true owner is. A precautionary measure that the State Attorney considered “essential” to guarantee the conservation of these 564 assets, which include assets of National and Documentary Heritage as well as others in the public domain.

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. He 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.”

The order indicates that the State Attorney argues that, given that the Francos could do whatever they wanted with the movable assets of the pazo, and since the dictator’s family has requested their delivery, this “would imply a clear danger of loss or disappearance of these movable assets, which would make any subsequent judicial pronouncement unfeasible. The court explains that this measure not only does not harm the Francos, but also benefits them because they do not have to pay maintenance. “It supposes a patrimonial advantage for the defendants, who do not have to make the appropriate expenditures for this purpose.”

The legal battle for ownership

The judicial battle for the ownership of Pazo de Meirás started several years ago, when a court in Galicia ruled that this property, originally owned by the writer Emilia Pardo Bazan and where Franco and his family spent their vacations after the Civil War belonged to the State and not to the descendants of the dictator. Then another lawsuit started: who would keep the hundreds of goods that were inside the Pazo. At the end of last September, a court in A Coruña authorized Carmen Martinez-Bordiu and his brothers to take most of the goods, except the 132 that could not be physically removed.