Hi there my name is alan and i live in paphos, cyprus with my wife and 4 children, this is our story of how we followed a dream and got a nightmare all because of MRI.
We came to paphos in February with MRI on an inspection trip, me and my family wanted to start a new life abroad so cyprus was our choice. We found a new 4 bedroom villa with a pool that hadn, t even been started, in the small village of Annarita, we spoke to people who lived in the developers other properties and everyone said he was fantastic, no problems.
We put down our 5000 euro reservation fee, and the next day were taken to the solicitors to go through the contract, the solicitors name was Emily. L and as in the uk i thought my solicitor would be working for me, i was wrong.
We went through the contract and signed over power of attorney to her to act on our behalf as we would be in the uk, we then met with her financial advisor a man named Polis who went through all the figures for the mortgage, all the figures were based on my uk income and i even asked the question at the time why are you doing that when i am going to be living and working over here and all i got was ' this is how we do it in Cyprus'.
After going through all the figures and getting a guarantee that the mortgage was not a problem we signed the contracts, and was told that I would have to have the rest of the 20% deposit sent to the solicitor by February 18th in our case that was 91000 euros the 5000 euro reservation fee the total 96000euros. My wife and i left happy thinking we were on our way to our new life abroad.
We had sold our house in the uk, packed the container bound for cyprus, and me, my wife and 4 children set off on the long journey to cyprus, yes we drove all the way from the uk to cyprus in a mercedes vito, an adventure in itself, we arrived in cyprus march 12th to our 3 bedroom flat that we rented for 1 year whilst our house was going to be built, also through MRI.
I know you are probably getting bored at this point so I'll cut a long story short, we got refused the mortgage, 'our' solicitor released all our money to the developer before the mortgage approval came through, the developer then paid MRI there commission a massive 10% of the purchase price 48000 euros (not bad for 3 days work) out of our 20% deposit.
The way it stands for me now is that the developer has paid me 5000euros back so far and says he needs to re-sell the house in order to get the other 43000 euros back to me (the way the market is that could be anytime), and MRI have said i won't get any of the 48000euros they have got of mine back, 'my solicitor' won't even talk to us and even had the nerve to send us a bill for a massive 10000euros for her services, what a joke, giving me a bill for losing everything we had, she also said if we pay her bill she will help us get out money back, ok I'll get ripped off twice.
Thats what happened to us, Cyprus is very corrupt, it's all back handers and people who know other people, the authorities over here know that it's going on but don't do anything to help victims like us. My advice to anyone wanting to move out here is to rent for a year, don't use companies such as MRI, the developer even told us that if we had gone directly to him with out MRI we would have saved 48000euros on the purchase price. BE VERY CAREFUL
Alan
KATO, PAPHOS
Cyprus
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