Matthias Kühn on the terrace of his house in Mallorca

Matthias Kühn on the terrace of his house in Mallorca. | Archives

Patrick CzelinskiPalma15/03/2024 10:41
TW
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You can like Matthias Kühn or not. Just like luxury developments in particular and the Mallorca business of property companies in general. But the fact that the former real estate mogul from Germany now has to be compensated with almost 100 million euros from Mallorca’s tax coffers is neither his fault nor that of other entrepreneurs or investors.

The fact that tax payer’s money will now flow into Kühn’s pockets and that the Balearic “govern” will have to take out a loan for this is mainly due to the poor building policy of the island’s governments. Those who first designate areas as building land and later reclassify them should not be surprised if the resulting legal uncertainty comes back as a compensation boomerang, sometimes 15 years later.

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2013 protest against property development in Soller, Mallorca

Amount of compensation owed to property developer Matthias Kühn is "a disgrace"

Socialists and Conservatives have simply not been able to find a viable consensus here in recent decades to create a legal basis that all parties involved can rely on. The right creates building land, the left turns it back into “rural space”. The result is “suelo-pingpong” at its finest. Ideological petty wars between municipalities and governments do the rest - until at some point the judiciary gets involved, whose mills grind slowly, but they do grind, as the Kühn case has shown.

It is particularly incomprehensible that in more than a decade it has not been possible to reach an agreement with those affected on compensation payments, which would certainly have been lower than the compensation payments now ordered by the court, one third of which consist solely of interest. Let there be no misunderstanding: Environmental and landscape protection are important, and Mallorca is certainly far too beautiful to be paved over with luxury homes everywhere.

However, if landscape protection is so badly done that it ends up costing ordinary people 100 million euros, nobody is helped. For comparison: the sum is almost equivalent to a whole year’s holiday tax revenue. This money could have been used to support many environmental projects ...