We are selling a property for an English couple who have now moved back to the UK.
They came here from Mallorca, where the lady had her own legitimate soft furnishing company. When they were leaving to come to the mainland, she instructed her gestor to close the company down, and gave him money to pay any outstanding monthly autonomos payments, tax, IVA etc. This was in August 2007.
We now have a buyer for her property and it now appears that there is an original debt against the property of 6600 Euros, which over time, with interest/fines/multas/charges is now almost 10000 and growing by the day. It appears that the gestor did nothing and all the unpaid autonomo etc has mounted up.

Please, please be careful to complete business contracts etc like this, especially now that many people are going permanently back to the UK. Also keep all of your paperwork, even if you think you dont need it.

Now she has a problem of having to pay the 10k, before the sale of her property can complete, or we are trying to make an agreement with the buyer that it is paid on the day the property completes.

Of course, for anyone who is pretending to run a legally registered business, (and I know a few of those!!!!)  but dont pay autonomo/tax/IVA etc, you dont have to worry about this ever happening, except when you get a knock on the door either here or in the UK, because apparently according to our contact in the Spanish Hacienda (inland revenue to us) just your NIE number is sufficient for them to eventually find you anywhere in the EU....................interesting thought!

So as usual it hardly pays you to be up front and honest here either, apart from the fact that we can sleep at night.
Jools 

But why did the Notaire, who handled the original purchase of the property, not notify the buyer, that there was an outstanding debt on the property ?

Thats usually down to your solicitor to weedle out, not always obvious from your esquitura unless you have borrowed against the value of the property!