In 2023, it emerged that the children of Mariola Martínez-Bordiú, Franco’s granddaughter, were planning to build luxury flats in the exclusive Calle Velázquez area of Madrid, kicking out the current tenants in order to do so.
Through the property company ARD V53, the brothers Francisco de Borja and Jaime Ardid Martínez-Bordiú bought several properties to remodel and sell. The wider Franco family already had several companies involved in the hotel and luxury property businesses.
It also has investments in public relations companies, parking spaces, and daycare centres. Incredibly, Spanish daily El País reported in 2019 that the Franco family also had a 17 percent share in a company that provides catering to La Moncloa, the official residence of the Spanish Prime Minister.
Companies with links to the Franco family also benefited from a tax amnesty offered by the Spanish government in 2012, something that revealed €7.6 million in undeclared foreign income.
In recent years, however, it seems the family’s property business has been going particularly well. According to Spanish digital newspaper El Confidencial, the two great-grandsons have so far signed sale contracts worth €57.77 million for seven properties on Madrid’s Calle Velázquez, on average more than €8 million per unit.
Spanish media reports the brothers bought 13 flats in total ranging from 350-390 m/2 each, as well as a 700 m/2 penthouse.
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Unlike the descendants of other former dictators around the world, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Franco have largely continued to live lives of aristocratic luxury in Spain long after El Generalísimo died.
An article by Business Insider compared the lives of descendants of other notable dictators. Whereas the great-grandson of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is a Georgia-based artist, for example, and the son of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was a manager at logistics company DHL for over a decade, over the years Franco’s descendants have continued to amass immense levels of wealth and property both in Spain and abroad.
In 2019 El País estimated the wider Franco family fortune was around €102 million and had a staggering 404 properties spread around Spain.
The dead dictator’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren have or had assets including at least 89 homes, 29 country estates, five commercial premises, three rural plots, and a palace, which the family was eventually evicted from in 2020.
Franco himself reportedly earned 50,000 pesetas (roughly €300) per year in 1940, but with his great-grandchildren now selling luxury apartments for millions of euros a piece, it seems clear that the Franco family found other ways to amass a fortune during his dictatorship.
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