The Provincial Court of Madrid has condemned Rocío Monasterio, the leader of Vox in Madrid and candidate of the formation for the next regional elections in this community, for the "illegal work" that she carried out in 2005 in a place in the center of Madrid to convert it in a house without having the necessary license, according to the sentence to which this newspaper has had access and Cadena SER has advanced.
In this case, revealed by EL PAÍS in 2019, the client and plaintiff is the actor and presenter Arturo Valls, who denounced the Monasterio company for a project that the Madrid City Council already considered illegal.
The sentence, which confirms the ruling of the first instance court of 2021, is forceful when considering that the Monasterio company carried out the work being "aware of its illegality": "All the work has been executed and paid for without having the corresponding permits municipal, being an illegal work in its origin for lacking the corresponding license”.
For this reason, the court condemns her, along with the construction firm, to pay a total of 8,043 euros as compensation for damages for breach of contract.
It is the sum of an administrative penalty of 3,838.49 euros and the cost of demolition to restore the legality of the property, which amounts to 4,205 euros.
The actor, contacted by this newspaper, does not wish to comment on the resolution.
In reality, he was demanding the return of the 116,000 euros he paid for the project and 129,000 more that he later invested in legalizing it, but on this point the judges do not agree with him, since they consider that "although the projected work executed is not legal (...), it has redounded to the benefit of the property”, since the reform gave the property a greater value and Valls later obtained income from renting it.
Vox Madrid has issued a statement this afternoon in which it indicates that the sentence "only condemns the payment of simple administrative fees, while it denies the client of Rocío Monasterio y Asociados (RMA) the payment of up to 250,000 euros that he demanded".
It also adds that the payment of these fees has been appealed, "so the sentence is not final."
The training ensures that “RMA carried out consulting work in which he informed his client of everything he needed to legalize his work.
It was the client who, after being informed, made his own decisions”.
Apart from this lawsuit, it has already been proven that in some of the municipal procedures for the work, Monasterio even falsified the stamp of the visa of the Association of Surveyors and Architects with a simple cut and paste.
According to the Prosecutor's Office, it included "a black and white photocopy of the seal (...) of a first project in that same property from 2005", instead of the mandatory stamps required by each new project, and that it did so in up to two times, in 2011 and 2016.
However, in June 2021 the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid dismissed the complaint by the Prosecutor on the grounds that the false visa was so "crude and rude" that it could not "go unnoticed", and this deprived the fraud of having a legal effect.
Project plan for a 'loft' in Madrid, endorsed in 2005 by the Monasterio studio and where she herself signs in her own handwriting.
The College of Quantity Surveyors found that the seal of the entity is not authentic.
This is just one of the 18 works with some kind of anomaly or irregularity, revealed by EL PAÍS since 2019, carried out by Rocío Monasterio, in some cases with the intervention of her husband, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, then real estate developer and current spokesperson. of Vox in Congress.
They were carried out between 2001 and 2010. In 14 of them, as in this case, they were premises that were transformed into housing without the corresponding license and in another four, the name or signature of the Monastery appeared on plans or construction documents. before having the title of architect, which she obtained only in 2009. In fact, in a trial in 2008 for another case, she had to admit that she was not an architect before the judge, perplexed by the fact that she signed documents without being one.
Faced with the controversy, the then dean of the Madrid College of Architects, Belén Hermida, stated in 2020 that the Monastery's practice of signing plans when it could not do so was comparable to "a doctor who signs when he is not qualified or not registered, or when a lawyer practices without having the corresponding degree”.
However, the college filed a complaint of intrusion against the far-right leader.
Since at least 2003, six years before obtaining her degree, Monasterio presented herself as an architect in press articles —this newspaper located at least 11 reports—, specializing in the construction of
lofts
, which became fashionable in the years of the real estate boom .
The pattern of conduct used to be repeated: Monasterio and Espinosa de los Monteros found commercial premises in central areas of Madrid and she undertook the works to convert them into housing, but she limited herself to sending the initial application for a license to the City Council, which in many cases was never received. to be granted.
She then disregarded the procedure, meanwhile she finished the work and sold the place as a residence.
All cases are prescribed.
More information
The map of the 'lofts' of Monasterio and Espinosa de los Monteros and the keys to the case
Following the information in this newspaper, the Madrid City Council opened inspections of each of the works, and although in these three years it has resisted revealing its result, in at least three cases it has already confirmed that it was illegal work.
One of them is precisely that of Arturo Valls's
loft
, for which the Provincial Court has now condemned Monasterio.
In 2020, the Councilor for Urban Planning, Mariano Fuentes, from Ciudadanos, lamented "the
modus operandi
of the different files reviewed, where the holders of the actions and their technicians took advantage of the inefficiency of the Public Administration to carry out actions not covered by an urban planning license ”.
The other two works where the municipal inspectors confirmed the irregularities of Monasterio and Espinosa de los Monteros were in the eight
lofts
built on Calle de Pedro Heredia, 6;
and another three in Villafranca, 6, old factories where the only legal use was industrial.
That is to say, they were not suitable for housing, but the marriage reformed them illegally.
In both cases, several of those affected assure that they were promised that they would obtain certificates of habitability that in reality they never managed and, furthermore, they were in any case very difficult or impossible to obtain.
The two far-right politicians deny making any such promises.
