Last week ended with another Supreme Court ruling bringing the total now to 25. This particular judgement was against Palm Oasis which is in Maspalomas in Gran Canaria, it followed other rulings that contracts in perpetuity in other words over 50 year are illegal. The German client in this case will be receiving back over 10,000€ as well as his contract being declared null and void.
At the start of this week Canarian Legal Alliance also announced that another of their clients, again a German timeshare owner will receive 19,163€. This sum has now been paid into the court and the client will shortly be paid out. His contract has also been declared null and void.
This particular sentence was made by Court number 3 of the First Instance in Arona Tenerife against Resort Properties / Silverpoint. It followed previous Supreme Court Judgements, so it is clear that the lower courts are abiding by the rulings of the highest court in Spain. This does show that the years of painstaking work by the legal team at CLA is paying off for their clients.
The strange thing is, timeshare companies, the RDO and TATOC are still denying the fact that this is happening. They still believe their own propaganda that there are no cases, the Supreme Court has got it wrong and that owners should not listen to or believe what they hear and read.
Could this be they are afraid that their jobs might just be in jeopardy, that they are losing all credibility as an industry with consumers?
On another note it also appears that members of Diamond are up in arms again, Inside Timeshare has received information that maintenance fees for the coming year are rising yet again. At first the news was that they were set to rise by around 18% but that figure has been lowered to around 13%.
According to Diamond the increase is due to the devaluation of the pound against the euro following the Brexit referendum. They also state according to our sources that they also have to pay for the points they own, so it affects their business as well. Little comfort to the members who have suffered increases year on year.
The explanation on how they arrived at the 13% figure is rather vague and does not make sense to those of us who are not accountants. According to the information given the budget for 2016 was £1 to 1.35€ i.e. a euro is 74 pence, for 2017 £1 to 1.15€ or 1 euro is 84 pence, so that is 17.5% difference. They then explain that as not all expenditure is in euros or only 60% this brings the actual increase to 13%.
We don’t know about you, but it sounds like a bit of accounting flannel designed to confuse. The question now must be asked if the pound gets stronger will the maintenance fees go down? Somehow we think not.
If you have any questions about these topics or any other timeshare matter, whether it is about companies you may be thinking of dealing with or have dealt with, Inside Timeshare will try to answer them for you. Contact can be made through the comments section.
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