Refuge for rich Venezuelans
Their country is in economic ruin. Hunger is rampant. Inflation is dizzying, expected to hit one million per cent by year’s end. Hospitals run out of medicine, equipment, even rubber gloves.
But as millions of Venezuelans wage a daily fight for survival at home, others have found a safe haven for their money across the Atlantic: Madrid’s real estate market.
During a walk around Salamanca, an upmarket district of the Spanish capital, Luis Valls-Taberner, a real estate investment adviser, pointed out on almost every street a building that he said a wealthy Venezuelan had recently acquired.
Valls-Taberner would not identify the buyers. Some properties, he said, were purchased through investment companies based in Miami or elsewhere — but the money always came from Venezuela.
Madrid’s housing prices surged about 17 per cent last year, the strongest rise among Spanish cities, raising the cost of living downtown to levels last seen in 2007, before Spain’s construction bubble burst.
The Salamanca district, with its fashion shops and restaurants, has been at the heart of the boom, partly thanks to rich Venezuelans. Many are opponents of President Nicolas Maduro, fleeing their country’s political and economic turmoil. But some are linked to his government and perhaps worried about their futures in the face of international sanctions and social unrest.
“I now sometimes find myself sitting in restaurants in Madrid right next to people whom I wouldn’t feel comfortable ever seeing in Caracas,” said Leopoldo Lopez Gil, the father of Leopoldo Lopez, a leading opposition politician who has been kept under house arrest in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital.
In Salamanca alone, by the estimates of some Madrid real estate companies, over 7,000 luxury apartments are now owned by Venezuelans.
While some of this Venezuelan investment money comes from associates of Maduro’s regime, the bulk is from families who became rich decades ago, in an economy whose main asset, oil, was nationalized in the 1970s.
“The big fortunes in Venezuela have always been connected among themselves and dependent on having a good relationship with the state,” said Rolando Seijas, the Venezuelan founder of SNB Capital, a Madrid-based investment firm whose activities range from insurance services to an electronics component factory in southern Spain.
Unlike Mexicans and other Latin Americans now investing in Spain, he added, “We’re here as survivors who know that the bridges to our home country have probably been burned.”
Venezuelans are also among the main applicants to Spain’s “golden visa” program, which grants residency to foreigners buying a property worth 500,000 euros ($582,000 U.S.) or more.
“Madrid is becoming for Venezuelans what Miami once was for us — and remains for Cubans,” Seijas said.