SPAIN According to OCU (Organización de Consumidores y Usuarios), the consumers organization, Spanish consumers overpaid €93 million to notaries and property registrars in 2010, for the last bureacratic hurdle in cancelling a mortgage: its cancellation. 92% of bills examined by the organization showed some irregularity. As an average, notaries charged up to six times the fees established by new regulations that came into effect in 2007, which at the time was supposed to see a considerable decrease in the costs of cancelling a mortgage. In the case of property registrars, excesses in billing was over ten times the official tariffs. Extrapolating the data in OCU's report, the 372,042 mortgage cancellations that took place in 2010, it would seem that notaries and property registrars overcharged their clients by up to €93 million in a single year. According to OCU, since the changes in 2007, notaries should be charging only>>>
