When we receive a lawsuit or an order for payment procedure from the timeshare Resort Tropical Park for non-payment of maintenance fees, all the members who contact us feel profoundly defenceless. And they are right.
The order for payment procedure comes from the Community of Owners of timeshare in Tropical Park, in Tenerife. The first question we are usually asked is whether we should go there. The answer is yes. If a trial were to take place, it would be in Tenerife. This defense carries a cost.
It is possible to end the seized payroll or pension without any prior notice
In any case, the worst thing is not finding out that you have been sued for 6,000 euros and you have 20 days to pay the maintenance fees or oppose a procedure in Adeje, Tenerife. The worst thing is when the first news you get is a lien by the timeshare community. And yes, although it may seem incredible, it is possible to end up with the payroll or pension being seized without having had any prior notice. If this happens, it means that the procedure foreseen for the payment orders filed by Communities of Property Owners has been followed. In these cases it is possible to proceed with the execution without the alleged defaulter ever having received any notification.
There is a clear lack of defence for not even having been able to exercise the right to a defence for an alleged non-payment of maintenance fees for a timeshare. This is the perversion of a Law that uses a more than logical mechanism for claiming maintenance fees in Communities of Owners in a horizontal regime (that of habitual residence) and which constitutes an offence for those who, without being owners in the strict sense of the word, have all the prejudices of being so.
In short, the result of a Law made to measure for the Promoters of the time-share resorts. This law allows the partners of the resorts to claim debts as if they were members of a normal community.
Ex-members of Tropical Park receive «monitorio» from the Community of Owners
That the first news of an order for payment procedure is an embargo is always bad. It will not have been possible to discuss the amounts or the prescriptions and of course we will already be talking about an increase of at least 30% in interest and legal costs. It is likely to be much more because, with no location of the alleged debtor, the order for payment will take an average of two years to arrive since it was filed.
If this is already a considerable problem, we are going to put ourselves in the situation of an «alleged» partner who, without being one, never receives notification and one day finds himself with the seizure. We insist that this is possible.
Clients have passed through this office who were obviously in the Tropical Park database, but who never bought or who had already stopped being partners. Couples of a person who did buy, but without a contractual relationship with the property; divorced people who, in the distribution of goods, had run out of the week and even people who had already run out of the week because a previous debt had been awarded by another creditor.
If these clients who were no longer partners could not have been notified by the court, they would have been seized. At that point in the procedure it is very difficult to do anything about it and in any case, it will never be quick.
Lack of proof of ownership of the week
If the week is registered in the Land Registry of Adeje (Tenerife) in the name of one or two people, there is less doubt about who the real owner is, although the registration in the Land Registry does not constitute a property title in any case.
If the purchase of the timeshare week was by private contract, there are more problems for the timeshare resort to prove who is the owner and therefore obliged to pay the maintenance fees.
In principle, to justify who the owner is, it would only be worth having a copy of the purchase contract. But what happens if there is no such copy. Because the Community of Owners pulls its internal database and certifies that the owner is a particular person, whether he is or not. Without going into why the Community of Owners of Tropical Park has attributed to wrong persons the ownership of a week, we take for granted that these are errors without bad faith, it is obvious that the mechanisms of the «monitorio» procedure for the communities of owners give them an advantage and they take advantage of it.
The importance of time limits in an order for payment procedure
If you get a notice from the court, don’t think that not picking it up gives you an advantage. We have already commented on this, the procedure will continue without you being aware of it in all probability.
Like other resorts, Tropical Park uses the «monitorio» procedure to claim unpaid maintenance fees for the week. This order for payment procedure provides twenty working days, after notice is collected, to pay or object.
This is about one month to mount an opposition if the member is no longer an owner, to certify that the amounts requested are not prescribed or to try to reach an agreement that avoids ending up paying more in interest and costs.