Paragon and Properties of Costa Rica operate together to keep other people's money when they have no right to.
On Feb. 7, my wife and I sent to Properties of Costa Rica (PCR) an Agreement for Deed and a $39,500 check made out to Trust Account of Charles L. Neustein, P.A. We received a copy of the agreement signed by a representative of PCR within a matter of days. According to clause 2 of the agreement, [u]pon receipt of the signed Agreement and the deposit, the escrow agent disburses the deposit to PCR. Thus, as soon as CPR received the Agreement and the deposit (which it received in the same envelope), CPR was entitled to have the deposit disbursed to it; and the deposit seems to spend no time at all in escrow.
In contrast, here is how PCR deals with the persons making the deposit. Under clause 5 of the agreement, we were entitled to "cancel this transaction... By delivering to Seller ten (10) days from the date of site inspection a fully executed Request for Refund. Upon receipt of the executed Request for Refund, Seller shall return one hundred (100%) percent of the funds remitted by Purchaser. We inspected the site in Costa Rica on February 14 and submitted the request for refund to the Paragon office in San Jose, Costa Rica; and administrative personnel in that office immediately fax'd it to PCR in Hollywood, FL. While we were still in that office, I took a phone call from Lyle Wexler, PCR's Director of Operations, during which Mr. Wexler informed me that he would put our request for refund in his next quarter's budget and that it would be 4 to 6 months before we would get it.in a June phone conversation, Mr. Wexler told me that the reason we would not be getting our refund any time soon was that Paragon was making substantial improvements in its properties in Costa Rica and that the money was being used for that purpose. He also said that the Agreement for Deed put no time limit on how long they could hold our money. However, as I told him, upon receipt means on the occasion of receipt and that they did not have the right to hold our money as long as they wanted to.
In response to my complaint to the Better Business Bureau about PCR, Mr. Esteban Soto C., President of Paragon Properties of Costa Rica, S.A., untruthfully claimed that Mr. Wexler had told me in February that they are required to follow extensive protocol and procedures in order to essentially reverse' a legal transaction both here in the United States and in Costa Rica. That statement was false both because Mr. Wexler did not make any such statement to me and because there are no such protocols and procedures necessary as a precondition to simply refunding a deposit. It also is irrelevant, because the agreement does not state any such precondition for the making of a refund.
I am aware of others who have similarly been deprived of a timely refund of their deposits.
Despite repeated requests/demands, we did not get our money back until November, after we complained to the Florida Attorney General's office, which referred the case to Seniors vs Crime, a project that the AG's office funds.
Seniors vs Crime was quickly able to convince Paragon that it would be smarter to give us our money back rather than risk causing the AG to investigate further.
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