OPINION

Failure in democracy

VOTING is a key right that people have died for down the years. The fundamental democratic function to keep our politicians and mayors in check comes just once every four years in Spain. So it is a tragedy that so many expats - including tens of thousands of British nationals - have lost the opportunity to cast their vote on May 28.

And this, despite a last minute agreement between the UK and Spain during the shambles of Brexit that enshrined the right. However, little known to almost everyone, Brits now would need to register to vote every four years before a mid-January cut-off date.

Sounds simple enough, but despite some small, sporadic information campaigns to remind people last year, the majority of British nationals didn’t get the message.

Registration has understandably bombed and alarmingly in some regions, such as Murcia, only 5% of foreign residents will be able to vote.

Take the resort of Manilva, where as many as 4,000 (25%) of the town hall register (padron) is made up of British expats, yet less than 800 can apparently vote.

Taxes

This is a total joke given most British expats pay taxes in this country and have often struggled to get properly registered, not to mention get TIEs and driving licences.

They have a right to vote.

So to give them just a six week window to register, stretching across Christmas, New Year and the Three Kings, was a total joke.

An extension of just one day was even more laughable!

“There were so many ridiculous hoops,” explained one longterm expat, on the Costa del Sol.

“You could register online but most people don’t have the digital certificate… and you still needed a clave (password). And then you needed a video conference.

“For someone in their 60s or older without decent Spanish and not digitally savvy it was a major uphill struggle.”

This is simply not acceptable and the Olive Press is now calling on the British government and embassy to step in and get this sorted out for 2027.

We need a proper post mortem and pressure from the embassy. The ambassador and his team need to get their act together and quicker than they did with driving licences. This is as easy as ABC. There’s been a failure in democracy. Sort it out and sort it out fast!

PUBLISHER / EDITOR

Jon Clarke, jon@theolivepress.es

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Best expat paper in Spain

HUNDREDS of people go missing in Spain every year. Mysteriously, when it involves a tourist or someone from the expat community, it is not uncommon for the case to go unsolved for ages – or never be solved at all.

A search for missing English rugby player and X-Factor star Levi Davis, who had been living in the Balearics, has yielded no results after six months. The high profile investigation has attracted a lot of media coverage, but it is by no means an isolated incident. Meanwhile, the mystery of Baltic expat Agnese Klavina may be closer to being solved with her body very likely to have turned up a fortnight ago in Marbella.

But the strange cases of teenager Amy Fitzpatrick and mum Lisa Brown (both of which the Olive Press investigated at length) are no nearer being cracked.

Agnese Klavina

Last seen leaving celebrity hangout Aqwa Mist nightclub in Puerto Banus with British millionaire Westley Capper, Latvian expat Agnese has not been seen since September 2014.

Privately educated ‘Wes’, who died from Covid in 2021, partly grew up in Essex and partly at posh private schools in Marbella. He and his Scouse accomplice Craig Porter (whereabouts unknown) were filmed forcing Agnese into a car on the club’s CCTV. A body language psychologist concluded that Agnese looked ‘visibly distressed’.

The following day CCTV footage showed four masked men loading a large black holdall onto a yacht belonging to Wes’s dad – John ‘Freddie’ Capper, a self-made millionaire who owns various homes in the Benahavis hills, including Madronal and Zagaleta, where he mostly lives.

Capper and Porter had claimed that they were driving Agnese to another party but she changed her mind and asked them to drop her off near her house in Monte Halcones, close to the villa of ex-England manager Flavio Capello.