North Cyprus Property | Property Victims savings “eaten up by the greedy legal profession”

That the old and frail have been easy targets of the unscrupulous is well known and not just limited to Northern Cyprus.  We all remember the Maxwell pensions scandal, when Robert Maxwell openly stole from the Mirror Pension fund and then when the situation became too hot to handle took the coward’s way out leaving his family to face the music.

I remember being told that Pension funds were sacrasanct and protected even from creditors. Well Mr Maxwell proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that nothing in this world is safe, that the money put away for one’s old age is no safer than the money you put under your mattress. In fact, the money under your mattress is safer. If a burglar finds the money under a matress, there is only one victim, whereas Maxwell’s victims were counted by the thousands.

As a youngster I had it drilled into me: ‘put your money in bricks and mortar’, or in the case of the TRNC builders ‘in concrete and breezeblock married together with a liberal does of sea salt’.  Does anyone know how to stop that stuff bleeding out of the walls?

The elderly were attracted to the TRNC which was marketed as a safe place to live physically and a very safe place to buy. I have to say the fact that so many of us bought into that dream speaks volumes for the ‘then’ marketing. Now we all see it for what it really is, the biggest ‘con’ since we were all told to save for our old age through pension schemes. Hands up all of you who were given projections of a fabulous yield for your money if only you put it into a pension scheme. Hands up all of you who bought in the TRNC and were told, it is as safe as houses (pun intended), you will get your Permission to Purchase and the title into your name, the waiting is just a formality. Hands up all of you who were told that after you signed the Contract and paid Stamp Duty to the Revenue, the Contract was legally binding on both parties? Hands up all of you who believed that? Now, hands up all of you who now know differently?

Scheme, now our mistake was to assume it was the noun they were talking about, i.e. a careful arrangement of different components or a plan of action. What we should have been looking at was the adverb: a secret plan intended to cause harm or damage. Well most of us have seen the damage or are experiencing it first hand by a much reduced pension than the one forecast. Certainly Mr Robert Maxwell schemed and planned and the end result was the end of any pension expectations for his loyal workers.

I realise that not all victims are the elderly, or indeed foreign. One thing I can say about the rogues in the TRNC, they are equal opportunity rogues and will prey on ayone regardless of age, sex, nationality, colour or creed. It is however a fact that a majority of victims are pensioners who have used their hard earned cash, saved from a lifetime of work to pay for their homes here in the TRNC. The same people who diligently set up pension ‘schemes’ either privately or through occupations, who when they had the cash put voluntary contributions into these occupational ‘schemes’. These very careful people came to the TRNC, followed the legal route in purchasing their properties, were told they were protected by law and now find themselves ‘thrown to the wolves’.

Now we, the victims are fighting for our ‘rights’ in the TRNC only to find that we seem to have no ‘rights’. Theft from victims is ‘legalised’ by antique laws and there are no consequences for the villians even though it is obvious that their actions are premeditated and their only objective from day one was to commit fraud. The victims are having to fund the legal fight and often paying extortionate fees to the very legal profession who allowed them to be taken advantage of in the first place. Money that the victims no longer have and here again we go back to the pension situation. Old people live on pensions. The British ‘state pension’ is one of the worst in the civlilised world, the private pensions are much diminished due to ‘market conditions’ so the pot pensioners had planned for in their old age is almost empty.

Now I would like to take the opportunity to lay waste to the popular belief here in the TRNC that all foreigners are rich and that they can magically conjure up money at the drop of a hat. We are not rich, we are very rapidly becoming poor thanks to the greed of a few unscrupulous men.

The whole point is that the people who are having their homes systematically stolen from them, do not have the financial means to buy again, to start again, and the money they had hoped to use to live on is being eaten up by the greedy legal profession. The legal profession who, because of their alleged failure to protect their clients in the initial purchase, are double dipping into the meagre resources of the victims of the property scam here in the TRNC.

Never give in never give up.

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