French justice (part 1 - 2004)

This will probably be long (spread over several days), so I hope you are all sitting comfortably!!

I'm a Brit who has split her lifetime (living and working) between France and England since the late Sixties.

During 2004, while living in the UK, I started looking at ads on the web with the idea of buying myself a small property back in France, closer to my daughter. I found a couple of small properties that seemed interesting in the Loches area, south of Tours. Because the agency concerned hadn't met me and therefore wouldn't give me more information on the properties, I asked someone I knew living locally to make contact with the agency on my behalf, so as to have more information on the properties before travelling over to France and visiting them in person.

I had known this person for a couple of years and thought I could trust her, due to our shared interest in dog showing and breeding, our similar age (approaching sixty), our social situation (each of us living alone), as well as her professional status (French civil servant working for the tax authorities).

However, in addition to viewing the properties that interested me, this person also arranged to view other houses for sale with this same agency, in particular the property that was later to be co-owned between us as a French Société Civile Immobilière or SCI (non-trading property company). After her visits, she told me that the properties in which I was interested were not at all suitable and that it would be far better to buy this other property that she had visited in co-ownership with her.

On 12th December I arranged for a power of attorney with an English legal firm authorising her to sign house purchase documents on my behalf, and on 22nd December she signed the pre-sale agreement subject to suspensive conditions.

Since that time, I have come to know that my supposed “friend” (let's call her associate from now on) was in fact expecting an inheritance from her mother who had died a few months earlier. Until she received this inheritance, she would not have the necessary funds for purchasing the property and she therefore needed my financial input as collateral.