U-T URN N O !W

explain why it was taking so long.

For users of social media, the UK ambassador, Hugh Elliott, became a target for their ire.

In his regular video updates, he made clear that the embassy staff were reading all of the comments that victims were leaving for him. That must have been quite an experience, given the levels of frustration that people were expressing.

But thankfully, in the end, the situation has been resolved.

Now UK licence holders can get back behind the wheel. All they have to do is navigate the Spanish bureaucracy to complete the process. Let us hope this goes smoother than the negotiations did.

United have done?

This question takes us down a rabbit hole of wild conspiracy theories regarding Al-Thani and his stewardship of Los Boquerones.

Many malagueños suspect that his ownership was merely an exercise in laundering large sums of money internationally at the expense of the clubs and fans.

Valencia

Malaga fans might find some common ground with the Valencianistas , supporters of one of Spain’s traditionally more powerful clubs.

They performed the rare feat of toppling Barca and Madrid to win La Liga in 2004, after reaching back-toback Champions League finals in 2000 and 2001.

But then Singaporean businessman Peter Lim (pictured above left) arrived in 2014, and it all went downhill.

Lim is accused of asset-stripping Valencia FC, selling star players Carlos Soler, Gonçalo Guedes and Ferran Torres, and appointing his pal, former Manchester United hero Gary Neville, to manage the club for an abysmal four months.

Neville (who shares ownership of Salford FC in Manchester with Lim along with David Beckham and other famous United alumni) lost half of the 16 games he managed during a car crash tenure.

Lim has also refused to invest in the infrastructure or facilities of the club, and is currently burning through his 17th manager, club legend Ruben Barajas being the latest to sip from the poisoned chalice.

In fact, since Lim took charge, the club has reached the Champions League just once, in the 2017-18 season. Otherwise the trajectory has been borderline flatline. In response, fans of the club have been mobilising; abandoning the stadium on match day and taking to the streets to protest at the start of matches.

Not that Lim would notice: he hasn’t been at the Mestalla stadium in five years.

Models and money

Foreign ownership of Spain’s football clubs has not brought the riches and success seen in England and France, or, to a lesser extent, Italy.

That might be because the clubs with the greatest sporting and commercial potential are owned by their fans and not for sale.

Real Madrid and Barcelona, the true apex predators of European football over the past decade, are owned by their members, who vote to elect a president and board of directors.

This socios model, unique to Spain, treats clubs as a social organisation rather than a purely commercial enterprise.

Yet even this benign approach has run aground, with Barcelona struggling with a bloated wage bill and huge financial problems.

Real Madrid are faring better, but even they are struggling to compete with the financial firepower found in the Premier League.

The English league’s monetary muscle is based around highly lucrative television deals, and the wealth shared equally among the league’s 20 teams, whereas in Spain, the lion’s share of the television revenue is hoovered up by Real and Barca, leaving the rest of the league struggling.

Coupled with the genuine largesse of wealthy owners, English football clubs have blown their Spanish counterparts out of the transfer market water – and it is beginning to show in results. Already at a financial disadvantage, Spanish clubs find themselves attracting the wrong foreign investors who only make things worse.

Granada

Fans of Granada FC might beg to differ, of course: Chinese businessman Jiang Lizhang bought a controlling stake in 2016 through his sports investment company Desports Group.

Under Lizhang's ownership, Granada FC achieved promotion to La Liga in the 2018-2019 season, finishing as runners-up in the Segunda Division.

In their first season back in La Liga, they achieved an impressive seventh-place finish, qualifying for the Europa League for the first time in the club's history.

They reached the quarters of that competition the following season.

Things are looking up for Granada FC, with Lizhang making substantial investments into the club and looking like a proper businessman.

In the end, as malagueños might excitedly agree, to compete with billionaires and sovereign wealth funds you need to be owned by one.

In the past few months we have helped to get the Irish government to demand the reopening of the sad Amy case and also broken scandals like the giant Otero group’s sudden suspicious collapse, leaving hundreds of mostly foreign buyers out of pocket.

Reporter Walter Finch has doggedly pursued the truth behind the construction firm that has projects in Malaga, Mallorca and Valencia, now suspended.

Most recently Finch, who we poached from the Daily Mail last year, has exposed a cryptocurrency ‘investment’ scandal involving Gibraltar’s Globix platform that has seen hundreds of people - mainly expats - lose huge sums of cash totalling up to $70 million, maybe much more.

Over the course of weeks we have built up an ongoing investigation into the shady firm with a number of Russian links before carefully breaking the news a fortnight ago. No surprise it has since gathered steam with the involvement of a big London-based liquidators and one of Gibraltar’s leading KCs and politicians stepping in and we continue to probe.

Stories such as these are the reason we exist. It is a core part of the Olive Press’ identity to uncover wrongdoing and warn expats of the pitfalls that await them if they are not careful.

For years we have supported the expat community by rooting out crooks and scammers and launching environmental campaigns.

That’s why Sky News and the BBC, the Daily Mail and the Sun - to name a few - all come to us frequently when they want a story investigated.

We are the only English website dedicated to Spanish news that you can trust.

Our growing readership numbers (we have 30,000 registered on the website alone) are the proof of the pudding - consumers value well written, relevant and trusted news and are willing to pay for it.

The top five most read stories on www.theolivepress.es in the past two weeks are:

1- The UK hits back at the European Union’s Brit-hitting ETIAS tourist tax with one of its own

2- Lanzarote joins the Balearics in seeking to shut out British tourists in favour of Germans

3- The nightmare is finally over! Spain finally approves driving licence deal with UK meaning residents can legally get back on the roads

4- Spanish cuisine ranked third best in the world

5- Liverpool fans try to skip out on €2,200 bar bill in central Madrid

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