As we went to press on Wednesday, the Resident received updates on a very unusual protest by two men who purchased a dream holiday home on the Ria Formosa island of Armona only to find building works suddenly halted due to a tortuous land wrangle.
The last the Resident heard of this situation were the calming words of mayor António Pina who believed everyone involved – the issue includes 140 other houses – was out of the woods.
With a stroke of his pen, environment minister João Matos Fernandes was due to change Armona’s land plan, miraculously legalising everyone’s properties – including those of Paul Roseby OBE and his Broadway musical producer partner James Tod.
Yet Fernandes’ promised action has still not happened – and Roseby and Tod are now claiming the violation of their human rights.
“We are innocent victims of warring government agencies”, they explained in a press release earlier this week. “We have been lied to, ignored, and left to fight and pay for a battle that was never ours to fight”.
The release announcing the protest demanded “truth, transparency and democratic respect worthy of a government that professes to have Socialist principles and care for its diverse community”.
Within the story is the spectre of APA, the Portuguese environment agency headed up in the Algarve by Sebastião Teixeira, a man whose name is synonymous with so many attempts at the demolition of island homes.
Yet Teixeira too has been silent in recent months.
Roseby and Tod’s battles were highlighted in our paper last summer (click here). At the time their cause rallied the media both here and in UK and everything pointed to a solution being in the pipleline.
Now, over two years on and hundreds of thousands of euros out of pocket, the men are determined to force what they see as “an end to government lies.
As they say with the stroke of a ministerial pen, they will be at last left to live peaceful happy lives in the country they love.
But it really isn’t that simple. Said Roseby today: “The Minister politely asked to see us after we peacefully leafleted the majority of his staff for 2 hours outside the Ministry.
We were very grateful for his time and sincere honesty. He is now fully aware of our impossible situation, and is meeting again with Pina this week and we hope to have news next week that he respectfully promised to share with us by Monday.
But sadly it is very clear to us that the situation has not progressed as much as we have been led to believe over the past year since our collective protest outside Olhao Camara in August 2017.
We are physically and mentally exhausted by being treated like criminals, trapped in a Portuguese system of total inertia, so feel that our last endeavor to gain any justice will be to chain ourselves to Government property. After all, isn’t that what happens to criminals?
At no point during this nightmare have any government officials guilty of this mess ever shown any urgency, empathy or respect for its law abiding tax paying victims. The Environment is not just about nature it’s about people too. And like us some of those people are worthy custodians of a fragile eco system”.
natasha.donn@algarveresident.com
