From Carmel to Barbados: the hidden story of the developer who boasted of building affordable housing

BarcelonaThere are places where there is no room for silence. Where day and night intertwine with hardly any rest for the ears of the neighbors. On Paral·lel, the hum of cars and the hubbub of those who queue on the sidewalks at night follow one another without pause, occupying all corners of the sound spectrum.

Next to El Molino, an unfinished, almost disfigured facade, is neither alive nor dead: many windows boarded up with clay bricks seal the lower floors, as if no one had ever lived there. Further up, however, the building breathes through large metal windows, protected with green nets, as if the work had stopped without warning.

And only when day falls, just when the traffic subsides and there are no queues at the clubs yet, does this untamed structure emit its own light. Three homes project light onto the street, as if someone lived there. In most of the apartments, no one answers; and in the few where they do, no one wants to open. And after the buzzing of the intercom, only silence remains.

On the other side of the city, in the Carmel neighborhood, some residents have just moved into new construction apartments. But they have no electricity and depend on a generator that stops every afternoon, leaving the building in darkness.

The case of these buildings might seem like an epilogue to the 2008 crisis. But the blocks, located at 81-83 Paral·lel Avenue and 48-58 Bernat Bransi Street, are not scars from the bubble, but contemporary real estate wounds. And they are still raw.

The 30% developer

These wounds share a common denominator: a promoter until recently unknown who broke away from the sector's majority rejection of reserving 30% of new apartments for affordable housing. In a report by El País, he explained what was almost a feat: he had completed seven developments fulfilling this obligation. And he even boasted about it: "It is morally rewarding to contribute," he said. None of the developments from the El País report appear in this investigation.

His name, Ramon Triquell Monfort, is linked to an extensive corporate network. He is listed as the administrator of 35 companies, practically all in the real estate sector, but he holds about fifty positions throughout his career, many in already defunct companies. This has been the case for decades, but he does not own any property in his name anywhere in the country.

Nor is he particularly well-known within Barcelona's business community. Sources consulted by ARA have not been able to place him beyond the La Salut Tennis Club: his name appears as the second-place finisher in a competition of 13 members of this historic Barcelona racket club.

In an investigation over the past few months, ARA has collected the testimony of at least fifteen people who consider themselves harmed. All of them report problems in various developments built or renovated by him in recent years in the city of Barcelona.

Half a dozen buyers and owners complain about problems in two specific developments: the building on Paral·lel avenue, next to El Molino, which is currently being renovated, and the block on Bernat Bransi street, in El Carmel. In the latter, three couples have experienced a real ordeal in the purchase process: months of delays in construction, problems contacting the real estate agency after signing the earnest money, various summonses before a notary to sign a sale agreement that, they say, could not proceed, and finally the handover of apartments without utilities or fully completed works. "I signed crying," a resident explains to ARA. "The bank told us that was not normal," recounts another resident to this newspaper.

These points, Triquell, in response to a questionnaire sent by ARA, denies or refutes. He argues that the work was "completely finished" because it had the final work certificate (CFO). Triquell attributes the lack of electricity exclusively to "the delay of the distributing company" and states that the buyers "voluntarily" occupied the homes, having been informed of the situation.

Chain failures

These cases illustrate one of the less visible sides of real estate development, a capital-intensive activity with very capricious deadlines. All of this has pushed a handful of companies to the brink. Primarily construction companies, but also architectural firms and installers. Each has suffered separately. But behind company registries, annual accounts, and insolvency proceedings –the legal process for companies or individuals in a state of insolvency– lies a network of companies that extends beyond Barcelona and the Spanish state.

El ARA has been able to identify conflicts in at least eight developments, affecting half a dozen companies. Among these are Serom (Chapí, 46-50), SAT3 (Príncep de Viana, 21; Clot, 159; Frederic Rahola, 49 and Castillejos, 242), Contracta (Paral·lel, 81-83), PBS (Bernat Bransi 48-58, Arquímedes, 33 and Príncep de Viana, 21), Belenus Energy Systems (Bernat Bransi, 48-58) and F16 Construccions (Chapí, 50 and Paral·lel 81-83). In all cases, the complaint is the same: the developer of the building they were constructing stopped paying them.

Specifically, they report non-payment of work certifications –that is, invoices corresponding to work already executed and technically validated–, and they claim to have survived by a miracle. “We survived thanks to covid”, say executives from Sat3 and Contracta. The pandemic, which was supposed to be a blow to the construction sector, was the opposite for some: ICO loans gave them liquidity when they were most struggling. It was their lifeline.

For example, SAT3 suddenly found its access to the construction sites blocked by guards. The developer justified this by saying they had abandoned the site and there was a risk of squatting. The situation was repeated in other developments on consecutive days. Executives from SAT3, the affected construction company, not only deny this but are claiming more than 800,000 euros in unpaid bills from four developers –Langres Market, Spacek XXI, Astres Elements and Altrire–, all linked to Triquell and subsequently declared in insolvency proceedings without assets, which, in practice, leaves creditors with very few options to recover their debts.

This case is not being litigated, and therefore the debt is not recognized by anyone. But other court rulings acknowledge non-payments by this developer of hundreds of thousands of euros in favor of different construction companies. Needless to say, these rulings have also partially supported Triquell's position on some points, such as the retention or execution of guarantees – tools that the developer has to collect compensation if they consider that the builder has failed to comply –, within the framework of disputes over contractual compliance or after-sales incidents that the construction company had not resolved.

Other construction companies ended up in bankruptcy, such as F16, which claimed about 175,000 euros for the works on Chapí and el Paral·lel, but accepted to collect only 70,000 to save part of the debt in the face of the threat of total non-payment. "It was a capitulation, but we saw that there was no way to collect, otherwise -says a person close to the construction company-. They promised you a lot of money but with very abusive clauses, and then they applied them," he adds.

All the developments have been managed by I-Now, a new construction development management company of which Triquell is executive chairman.

A thread that reaches the Caribbean

If their administrator is the visible thread connecting the various companies in the network, the accounting records show something else: a complex network of intragroup loans also amounting to hundreds of thousands of euros. This is stated in the insolvency reports that this newspaper has accessed concerning two of Triquell's developers: Altrire, responsible for renovating the Paral·lel building, and Lassus Internacional, a company that erected a building on Chapí street in Barcelona.

Triquell defends that the creation of independent companies for each development is a standard industry practice, required by financiers to isolate risks. And he says there is no pattern of action, but rather "specific situations arising from external and unforeseen factors."

According to his version, the different insolvency proceedings filed by his companies are due to "serious breaches" by the construction companies, with delays that increase financial costs, forcing the application of penalties to protect the viability of the projects.

Following the thread leads to a key company in the network: Merinia Planning. Based at Avinguda Diagonal, 421 in Barcelona – like a large part of this developer's network of companies – Merinia is the core developer: it receives loans and participates in the shareholding of other companies. Its administrator is also Ramon Triquell, as in other companies in the network, and it has a single shareholder not registered in Spain: Noyus Holding Ltd, according to the latest available records.

According to what this newspaper has learned, through an investigation in collaboration with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), Noyus Holding Ltd is a company incorporated in Cyprus in January 2015. In October 2015, Noyus's shares changed hands: they passed from Globiance Limited, a "nominee" company – that is, one that usually appears on paper as a shareholder but is not the real owner – to Universal Ventures Fund, SCC, a fund based in the island nation of Barbados.

A few months later, in January 2016, a businessman from Barcelona was appointed director of Noyus. It was the same Ramon Triquell, who held the position until the company's dissolution in December 2024. According to documentation accessed by ARA, just one year before Noyus was dissolved, the secretarial firm declared under oath that it had lost contact with the "real owner". 

Currently, Cyprus offers one of the lowest corporate taxes in the eurozone and, according to the independent organization Tax Justice Network, it is a jurisdiction with a relevant level of financial secrecy. The organization has pointed out deficiencies in transparency regarding real ownership, especially in the effective ownership registers of companies and in public access to information on real estate ownership. In contrast, Barbados is considered a cooperative jurisdiction because it is adhering to international tax information exchange mechanisms. Its legislation also allows for structures such as segregated cell companies (SCC), companies in which a single legal entity can operate with patrimonially segregated cells, so that the assets and liabilities of one cell remain separate from those of the others. This design is commonly used to compartmentalize risks and manage differentiated investments or assets within the same structure.

Money without a public trail 

When consulted by ARA, Triquell admits the existence of these foreign corporate structures, but states that they were planned exclusively to seek international capital during the financial crisis that began in 2007. According to the promoter, these entities "never had any real operations" and generated no economic flow either to or from Spain.

These statements are neither proven nor disproven in Merinia's accounts – at least for the years 2014, 2019, 2020, and 2022, the only ones the company has filed with the registry –, with no reference to Noyus. However, what does appear in these accounts is a debt of 2.7 million euros with a "related party" since 2018. In parallel, it also declares an asset of the same amount in investments of its own group.

"The fact that an entity with no activity or business accumulates a debt of 2.7 million euros – with an age of over five years and without clear traceability of the creditor – is, from an accounting point of view, irregular," explains to ARA the general secretary of the Union of Technicians of the Ministry of Finance (Gestha), José Maria Mollinedo.

According to this accounting expert, Merinia's financial situation presents indications that could point to a plan for asset stripping, meaning that the businessman could be deliberately getting rid of assets to avoid paying creditors. However, with the publicly available information, it is not possible to determine the exact flow of these funds or confirm if there were actual movements of funds.

The architecture of bankruptcy

The money trail leads us to Serom, another construction company that took the non-payments of a Triquell developer to court. In September 2020, Serom claimed almost 700,000 euros from Lassus Internacional, which counter-attacked by claiming 300,000 in its favor. Finally, the judge recognized a debt of 387,600 euros in favor of Serom and, to ensure collection, ordered the seizure of 500,000 euros from Lassus. To guarantee payment, Lassus offered a right to collect 400,000 euros it had on Merinia. But, two years later, the situation took a radical turn.

When the debt collection seemed on track, Lassus filed for a creditors' proceeding without assets (express), a judicial process that forces creditors to challenge it if they want to recover their debts. The challenge is a costly process for the creditor which, added to the certainty that the company no longer has assets, usually discourages any legal action. Therefore, in practice, it can create incentives to shift risks to creditors, facilitating liquidations without an investigation into the causes of insolvency or the final destination of assets.

This formula of creditors' proceeding without assets has been the one repeatedly used by Triquell to dissolve companies without effective insolvency supervision, as it already did with Barbacana Construmat (2020), Wavecrest, Astres Elements, Spacek XXI (2024), and Langres Market (2025). If creditors do not challenge the process, an administrator is never appointed to investigate management.

The credit network

Despite the costs, Serom challenged the procedure and the judge appointed an insolvency administrator. The administrator's first assessment report was damning: it detected indications of acts detrimental to the active mass, mismanagement, and a possible culpable insolvency. Three out of three. This scenario opened the liquidation phase and a deeper investigation into Lassus's real assets.

The administrator's preliminary report revealed an accounting surprise: a item of 1.42 million euros in "investments in group companies" that Lassus had not included in the initial inventory. They were not material assets, but credits that had ended up with Merinia Planning. The figure tripled the 400,000 euros originally declared by Triquell.

According to the report, the developer claimed that these funds were unrecoverable due to a domino effect of insolvencies within the group. On one hand, Merinia would have lent more than 500,000 euros to Altrire, which was also in insolvency proceedings. On the other hand, a good part of the money would have ended up in Wavecrest, a group holding company that lost its main investment in the bankruptcy of Thrombotargets Europe. And for that reason, it had also entered insolvency proceedings. In this way, the impossibility of recovering the money was transferred from Wavecrest to Merinia and, finally, to Lassus. 

This newspaper has requested the loan agreements and bank transfer receipts for these 1.42 million euros from Ramon Triquell. The developer assures that these are operations "duly registered and reflected in the accounting" and in the annual accounts deposited in the registries. Even so, he has declined to send the bank receipts or the original contracts, citing the "age of the operations". 

In the same vein as Mollinedo, lawyer Carles Mundó, a partner at the Barcelona firm Vallbé, considers in statements to l’ARA that, given the publicly available information, it may seem that a pattern is being repeated in which the aim is to place oneself in a position of insolvency with the sole purpose of evading the fulfillment of obligations. “The reiteration of a pattern of conduct that always occurs in the same way is striking: an insolvency can be an isolated, perfectly explainable event, but many identical insolvencies in a relatively short period of time do not seem like a fortuitous situation, but rather could suggest a deliberate way of acting,” he assures.

Regarding Merinia's investments in Wavecrest, and Wavecrest's in Thrombotargets, Triquell states that they are recorded in their accounting records. When the ARA asked him to provide proof, the promoter simply said that these are "public and accessible". This newspaper has consulted the registration files of the two companies in the mercantile registry: in Merinia's accounts –only those for 2014, 2019, 2020, and 2022 are available– there is no explicit reference; in Wavecrest's case, the mercantile registry states the following: "The company you have selected has no accounts deposit available".

The domino effect

Thus, according to Triquell, the money that Lassus had left in Merinia –1.42 million euros– would have ended up in two loans that the developer considers uncollectible: one to Wavecrest, which made a biotechnology bet that was not successful, and another to Altrire, the developer that brings the case back to the beginning of the story: the building on Paral·lel located next to El Molino.

Contracta, a construction company that participated in the renovation of this building promoted by Altrire, recounts an episode similar to the others: first came the non-payments and then the work was blocked with guards, as had already happened in other developments by the same developer. The story that SAT3 experienced on Frederic Rahola street was repeating itself. 

In this case, the affected construction company, Contracta, anticipated and triggered the creditors' meeting for Altrire, meaning it appeared in court and requested the necessary meeting of the developer, with the aim of preventing, as had happened to SAT3 and Serom, the developer from declaring voluntary bankruptcy. Thus, Altrire lost the ability to administer its assets and the construction company avoided the company potentially selling assets that could harm the developer's final collection if it declared bankruptcy.

Triquell maintains that Altrire's bankruptcy was due to a “societal blockage” and that it was filed within the legal deadline. But the order from the Provincial Court of Barcelona states that the voluntary bankruptcy was not filed on time, and therefore maintains the prevalence of the necessary bankruptcy initiated by the construction company Contracta. Finally, the judge ordered Altrire to pay nearly half a million euros to Contracta, declaring that there was a unilateral withdrawal from the contract by the developer. The sentence thus rejected the accusation of abandonment of work that weighed on the construction company.

The bankruptcy reports also reveal a known and also discussed practice in the sector: the same partners of Altrire had placed mortgages on the apartments in favor of their own companies. Apart from the initial mortgage with the bank –in this case, Bankinter–, 11 of the 27 homes had another mortgage in the name of Neliant (which would later become Aldicer Capital, controlled by Javier Alsina), and five more had one in the name of Diagonal Sun, linked to Ramon Triquell.

In practice, this means that if the flats are sold to pay debts, the partners' companies have the right to collect before the other creditors, because their credit is guaranteed by the same properties. And in a creditors' meeting, these mortgage-backed credits usually have a special privilege: they are collected first. But in this case, the insolvency administrator reduced them to subordinated credits –the last in line– because they came from companies of the same partners. Alsina and Triquell ended up facing each other in court, and in January 2025 a judge eliminated almost 200,000 euros from the debt claimed by Triquell's company. With the credits already classified, the next step was to sell the assets and distribute the money in an orderly fashion.

A circular auction

The Altrire tender began in 2024, and in October of that year the 27 properties in the Paral·lel building were sold at auction for 6.12 million euros. But the winner was not the highest bid, which amounted to 6.57 million euros. Nor was it the second best offer, of 6.52 million, but the third. The reason? Both withdrew their bids to keep the building with the disfigured facade that the Altrire tender had left unfinished in the heart of Paral·lel. The first was from a company linked to Triquell and the second, from a third party: Sorom Tim.

Finally, it was Alsina who had sufficient financial muscle to get the icing on the cake: his company Neliant Equity was awarded the auction. But he decided to register the homes in favor of two other companies of his: 24 went to one and 3 to another.

The homes had changed hands, but not owners: they remained in Alsina's portfolio, one of the partners who had experienced the company's bankruptcy. Of the purchase price (6.12 million), more than 2.2 million euros were used to cancel mortgages on the apartments – which largely went to companies in the same group –, and almost one million to pay a debt to Diagonal Sun, owned by Triquell, which was not settled because it is under litigation.

This newspaper has tried unsuccessfully to contact Javier Alsina Cerdá, a partner in Altrire and Aldicer Capital, and a member of a business lineage. Triquell, in response to ARA, assures that Alsina will eventually be able to be compensated through assets. “I have been the only partner to have assumed a direct and unrecoverable loss of investment, and the only real victim among all those involved in this process,” he maintains.

While a definitive ruling from the insolvency administrator, who has brought to light the various credits and bankruptcies, is awaited, the Paral·lel building remains unfinished. New scaffolding now covers the facade, a symbol that something is moving forward, but insufficient for the hope of the weakest link in this whole story: residents who are still waiting to see if they will be reimbursed for the thousands of euros in special assessments this has entailed for them. 

The case highlights the difficulties in defining where a failed business management ends and where a strategy to limit responsibilities begins, in a sector where corporate structures allow risks to be transferred too easily. 

“I’ve had a really bad time, I’ve already lost faith in justice”, says an affected neighbor, who decides, despite everything, to break the silence she had maintained behind the intercom until now.