Gavira plans the church redevelopment and Puerto Targa deal

Gavira plans the church redevelopment and Puerto Targa deal as a single, high-stakes strategy: clear a valuable site in Santa Cruz for luxury tourism, use the project to help sell Puerto Targa to Saudi investors, and buy time for a Banco Cartujano whose accounts conceal mounting risks. The scheme links the threatened future of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas to the bank’s balance sheet and to Gavira’s struggle to secure control of the institution; its prospective failure could imperil all three.

The church site and the proposed deal

Gavira describes the church project as the best urban-development opportunity Seville has seen since the 1992 Universal Exposition: 3,000 square meters in the heart of Santa Cruz. It is tied to the purchase of Puerto Targa by Saudi interests, a transaction he values at between 180 and 200 million dollars. The archbishop’s willingness to secularize the church site, remove its parish priest, and demolish the building is a crucial step in the arrangement. Gavira presents the negotiations as a matter of bargaining over the price of securing those concessions, while Octavio Machuca recognizes that the archbishop’s cooperation must be rewarded. The exchange makes clear that demolition is not a separate civic matter but part of a coordinated commercial transaction.

That commercial vision is contested by the church’s condition and its history. Gris Marsala, the American architect responsible for its restoration on behalf of the Eurnekian Foundation, says that work has nearly stopped because budgets have not been approved and promised money has failed to arrive. She has been working on the project for two years; the church’s neglected appearance, she insists, does not establish that it must be demolished. It is three centuries old, and she contrasts the lack of protection it receives in Seville with the reverence an equivalent historic building would command in her own country.

Marsala’s technical assessment directly challenges the case for declaring the building ruinous. Although it is old and poorly maintained, its structure remains sound: neither the walls nor the vault have irreversible cracks. Most damage lies in the finishes, caused by moisture entering through defective roofs. Marsala says the roof has been retiled with lime, cement, and sand, using nearly ten tons of material raised fifteen meters, work she and Father Óscar carried out themselves. In this account, the visible deterioration is real but repairable; the designation of the church as a ruin is also a justification advanced by the city, the bank, and the archbishop’s office for its demolition.

Puerto Targa and the bank’s hidden exposure

The Banco Cartujano investigation describes Puerto Targa as a company established to develop a golf course, luxury homes, and a marina near the protected area of Doñana National Park. Its original capital was five million pesetas. After a capital increase to nine billion pesetas, the bank bought 78 percent of its shares at Gavira’s instigation; private investors retained the remaining 22 percent. Among them was H.P. Sunrise, based in the French Antilles, which investigators suspected might be connected to Gavira, though the report does not present that connection as proven.

The expected sale to the Saudi company Sun Qafer Alley was repeatedly presented as imminent, and as a way to produce a substantial gain for shareholders and a large commission for the bank. But the sale did not take place on schedule. In the meantime, the bank’s reported risks continued to rise. The investigation found that previously concealed items emerged as its inquiry proceeded, bringing the total exposure to 20.028 billion pesetas; only 7.020 billion of that amount was attributed to Puerto Targa. Gavira’s vice-presidency continued to claim that the Saudi purchase would normalize the bank’s position, even as the delay left it exposed to the very risks the promised deal was supposed to reduce.

Investigators concluded that Puerto Targa had been financed almost entirely by the Banco Cartujano from its creation, through a complex structure involving companies based in Gibraltar. Most members of the bank’s board had not been told the extent of that financing. The report describes a circular transaction: the bank effectively sold the company to itself through the Gibraltar entities, then recorded the 7.020 billion pesetas purchase as income in an earlier balance sheet. A later sale to Sun Qafer Alley was supposed to generate further gains and help cover a hole of more than 10 billion pesetas in the bank’s accounts, a deficit associated with both Gavira’s management and the burden inherited from earlier administrations.

The report warns that failure to complete the sale could leave the bank in grave difficulty and expose the concealed condition of its accounts. It also identifies false accounting, the breach of banking rules, costly efforts to obtain new resources, and lending risk it characterizes as reckless. Investigators cite large payments made without adequate documentary justification, including payments to people and public institutions that might amount to bribes, as well as Gavira’s involvement in client businesses and possible—but unproven—receipt of benefits or commissions. The proposed rescue was therefore inseparable from governance concerns: what was presented as a route to recovery could deepen the institution’s exposure and damage its standing among conservative small shareholders, many of them Catholic.

Why the church redevelopment matters to Gavira

Gavira’s own calculations explain why the church development is so closely bound to the Puerto Targa sale. He has been using Puerto Targa and similar ventures to gain time while consolidating his position at the bank. The church project is intended as bait for the Saudi purchasers: a luxury hotel, designed to attract elite tourism to the northern part of Santa Cruz, would complement the wider investment. Its plans describe a small, exceptionally exclusive hotel with extensive services, only 500 meters from Seville’s former mosque, and identify the project as a personal preference of Kemal Ibn Saud, a brother of the Saudi king and a principal shareholder in Sun Qafer Alley.

The prospective transaction also bears directly on Gavira’s career. He is close to gaining effective control of the Banco Cartujano, but the church plan has one unresolved obstacle: a family privilege documented in 1687. It stipulated conditions under which land ceded for the church would revert to the Bruner family if those conditions were not met. A later law, passed in the nineteenth century during Mendizábal’s confiscation of church property, provides instead for land to revert to the municipality of Seville in the event of secularization. The legal conflict leaves the redevelopment vulnerable to a lawsuit by the duchess and her daughter, which could delay the scheme while major investments and commitments are already in place.

Gavira understands that such a delay could threaten his own succession to the bank’s presidency. Machuca might have to repudiate his protégé before a board on which Gavira has substantial enemies, just as the younger vice-president approaches power. The church scheme, then, is not simply an ambitious property deal: it is one of the supports holding up Gavira’s standing within the bank. Its failure could expose the financial strategy and give opponents a reason to block his ascent.

The documents, the threat, and the larger significance

The bank’s internal report places the church transaction alongside Puerto Targa as a possible source of reputational damage. Even if the proposed sale eventually stabilized the accounts, public knowledge of the operations surrounding both the bank and Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas could alienate the institution’s traditional clientele. The overlap matters: a threatened church, a luxury development, and concealed financial exposure are parts of the same plan, so controversy over one can illuminate the others.

Gavira keeps the development documents and a report on his management encrypted on his computer, along with other secrets. He has copies on disks and CDs inside a safe beneath a Klaus Paten painting. When he notices the hacker’s bouncing ball near this confidential material, he considers whether the intruder may have reached the protected file and deletes it as a precaution. The scene gives the plan a second vulnerability: beyond the disputed land and the delayed sale, its survival depends on keeping its documentary record out of reach.

The project’s central irony is that the church’s apparent decline is used to make demolition seem necessary, while the restoration architect’s account describes substantial repairs already completed and a structure that remains sound. At the same time, the bank presents a speculative sale as a solution to risks created by circular financing and concealed losses. In both cases, the public justification—ruin in one, imminent recovery in the other—sits uneasily beside the evidence. The interlocking deals reveal how Gavira’s financial ambition converts a historic religious site into an asset in a rescue strategy whose success has never been secured.