Chapter 35: Chapter 35

bankers were hiring traders again and stock markets were looking up; for

those who had survived the tsunami, it was back to business as usual. Liam

Clancy was one of the lucky ones. Armed with his newly acquired

experience it was time to look beyond Marbella. The streets of London were

perhaps after all lined with gold, he thought as he boarded the Iberia flight to

Madrid and London. It must be like this after an earthquake, he mused as he sipped

his gin and tonic, once the aftershocks were over you cleared away the rubble and

started building again.

Since the explosion of the sub-prime crisis, banks had cleverly learned how to

hide their huge liabilities, using special off-balance sheet vehicles, complicit

auditors and a host of other tactics to bury them. It was why recapitalisation had

been so necessary for Fitzwilliams.

After Clancy’s telephone conversation with INI’s human resources manager and

his convocation to meet Pat Kennedy, he sensed something big was at hand. He

had had his fill of the Costa Blanca’s silent resorts and the depressing skeletons of

naked grey concrete that dotted the landscape. Unfinished condos lined empty

streets; homes that should have been filled with happy sun tanned tourists. The

facades of those that had been completed were now dotted with ‘Venta’ panels

announcing apartments for sale at giveaway prices.

A calm had settled over Puerto Banús, a resort that boasted the greatest number of

designer boutiques in the world. The owners of extravagant yachts were keeping a

low profile, that is if they weren’t selling. Their Bentleys were hidden from view to

avoid vandalism and bikini clad bimbos were discretely sipping their champagne

out of view.

Marbella bars and restaurants were dismally empty and come evening the traffic

had all but disappeared from the streets. With the collapse of the property market

and the once booming construction sector, the trickle of parting expats was

beginning to look like the biblical exodus from Egypt.

The flight to London that Sunday morning was full, no doubt Brits fleeing Spain

for Blighty, he thought. Madrid’s modern Barajas Airport was a vestige of the

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good times Spain had enjoyed, vast and modern, but as Clancy wandered around to

pass the time between flights, the indications of how serious the economic

downturn were everywhere.

During the euphoric boom, sunshine and sangria had tempted many Britons to

pull up roots and make a new life on the Costas. But it was now evident that many

were returning home for good, packing their bags, forced out by the double effect

of a strong euro and a local economy in deep crisis. House prices had fallen by as

much as fifty percent, work prospects had dried up, and their courage sapped by

the lost illusion of an easy life of endless sunshine, cheap cigarettes and flowing

wine.

The number of Latin American faces in departures surprised him, what he did not

know was most had one-way tickets in their pockets. In the previous decade, five

million foreign workers had immigrated to Spain, but times had changed and with

unemployment nearing twenty percent, newcomers were amongst the first to lose

their jobs.

One of the largest groups of immigrants hit by the crisis were Romanians, whose

homeland was only very recently a member state of the EU. In towns like Alcala

de Henares, near to Madrid, the birthplace of Cervantes, ten percent of the

population was Romanian, many of whom, unlike the Latinos, had no intention of

returning home where the economic situation was even worse than that of Spain.

At the Iberia flight departure gate, it was clear not all of the British travellers

were tourists returning home from holiday. The returning holidaymakers were full

of life carrying their collection of souvenirs, straw hats, stuffed bulls and the duty

frees bought with the last of their euros. The expats were not so young, looked

sadder, and their carry-ons more down to earth.

Spanish banks had lent over three hundred billion euros to local real estate

promoters and were holding billions of euros of property in guarantee for the loans

they had made to now insolvent developers, property that fell in value with each

passing day, selling at discounts of as much as forty percent.