The short-ish version is we gave our contractor who was renovating the building a power of attorney to submit plans and pull permits with the city of Porto. He altered the poa to enable him to sell the property, enlisted a crooked notary, and sold the property without our knowledge. The property was vacant as we awaited plans to be approved by the city to renovate it. We later found out the sale happened in September of 2024. In January of 2025, our tax representative sent us a notification that we no longer owned the property and needed to file taxes on any gain from the sale of the property. We felt certain it was some sort of weird administrative error. Panicked, we contacted our attorney, and she confirmed the property had been sold and we no longer owned it. As soon as we found out, our attorney put an emergency hold on the building so it couldn’t be resold. We had a court hearing this June where the judge seized the property and gave us custodianship of it while we await the criminal trial to hopefully regain ownership of it, which won’t be for another year.
The police interviewed us and said it’s a racket that takes place regularly by different groups. The buyer of our property already had it under contract to sell to a third party, but we found out about the sale in time to stop the flip.
The buyers are claiming they are innocent parties who didn’t know they were buying stolen property, and there’s a law in portugal that protects buyers who in good faith buy stolen property. So the judge in the criminal trial could award ownership to the buyers unless we can prove they didn’t enter into the sale in good faith, so we’re having to hire a private investigator to connect the dots between the contractor who sold the building, the crooked notary, the buyers and the buyers they had the building under contract with.
To make matters worse, we didn’t own the building at our aima renewal appointment, which was also in June, and proof of ownership of the investment property is the key requirement of renewing. So we submitted all the documents we had, plus copies of the lawsuit, in hopes that someone up the chain will take pity on us and give us our renewal.
So on this forum when I found out many/most people who invested in property were shifted to an entrepreneurial D2 visa, I thought maybe proof of ownership of the investment property wasn’t required, and that somehow we could switch to that visa since we don’t own our investment property currently.