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.