£12,000,000 LAND SEIZURE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 17919, 25 October 1932, Page 12

£12,000,000 LAND SEIZURE

SPAIN'S MEASURE ‘CONSTRUCTION OF NEW STATE’ MADRID, Sept. 10. Some 300 members of the Spanish nobility, known ns Grandees of Spain, will bo affected by the law providing for the expropriation of rural property “whoso owners may at any time have exercised their honorary prerogatives. ” A rough estimate of the lands affecled by the measure placo their value at £12,000.000. Members of the “extinguished nobility” whose property is confiscated without indemnity will be granted a State pension if they can prove that they are penniless. The Institute of Agrarian Reform, which is to deal with all such cases, will bo authorised to concede indemnities only for actual improvements made, in the land. It will investigate each case according to a complicated schedule. TO TRANSFORM SPAIN Senor Azana, the Premier, declared in the course of the debate in the Cortes on tho new measure that the Government had resolved to destroy: “The old, archaic and corrupted foundations of the State and begin tho constitution of a new .State which will completely transform Spain.” Tho Duke of Berwick and Alba, owing to his personal interest in the cultivation of land, will probably be entitled to largo indemnities.. Some two years ago he said that his. ancestors had given away much of. their property to peasants, but tbat is had invariably reverted to them in time. Usury and bad management were factors which had undermined all attempts, especially in tho South of Spain, to create farm ownership on a small scale. It is feared that one result of the measure may bo to endanger tho supply of bulls for bull-fighting. Many of tho bulls arc bred on the broad expanses of land owned by the grandees. If they are expropriated and the land divided up tho breeding of bulls may be greatly diminished.