Overseas Property News

Brits who invested in the Lagoa do Coelho resort have lost everything after Luís Mateos, the Spanish developer behind the scheme, is languishing in jail in Spain charged with fraud, while the site of the project, one hour's drive north of Natal, is untouched.

Mateos, the president of Grupo Nicolás Mateos, was sent to prison last December after a handful of Spanish investors who had bought in Lagoa do Coelho pressed charges against the developer. The number of investors who lost out is estimated to be more than 500 across Spain, the UK and the rest of Europe. Many of them are taking further legal action to recoup losses.

Many who were sold the dream of northeast Brazil as a paradise and property hotspot while prices rose steeply in the mid-Noughties still have little to show for their ventures. With the property boom officially over, the coastline of almost continuous beaches, from Bahia to Rio Grande do Norte, is littered with plans for property developments that have never come to fruition.

Schemes by Spanish developers, launched with enormous fanfare, are the most notorious.

The Grupo Sánchez, a Spanish developer of 20 years that made its name in the Costa del Sol, is one example. Sánchez was planning Grand Natal Golf, a flashy scheme of 3,200 homes in Natal, advertised by Antonio Banderas, when it went into administrative receivership with debts of €97 million in March last year.