http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,1,00.html
Focus: Battle over a Roman paradise
Carla Powell has the ear of Europe's political elite but no one can help her in a battle over her Roman paradise
For nearly two decades Carla Powell was among the most forceful political hostesses in London. The fiery wife of Charles Powell, one of Margaret Thatcher’s inner circle, she was a networker with more connections than Google, accumulating the great and the good the way others collect Meissen china.
When Powell returned to her native Italy four years ago, contemplating a quiet retirement with her husband at a villa 25 miles from Rome, she rejoiced that she had put all the “bitchery of London” behind her.
She could not have been more wrong. Her arrival sparked a feud that flared into open hostilities last week between herself and the local mayor.
“This is war,” she declared yesterday. “I am down in the trenches and I haven’t slept for three nights. I don’t care if they kill me.”
This, remember, is a woman renowned for the passion of her vendettas, sometimes spending hours on the telephone denouncing her victims. She is also renowned for the eminence of her contacts.
Heads of state take her calls. Once, famously, her husband tried to interrupt her telephone conversation, pleading with her to get off the phone in case Thatcher wanted to speak to him. She replied sweetly: “But Charles, darling, this is the prime minister.”
The issue that has sent her to war now — mobilising her powerful contacts as she does so — is water. The Powells’ drama has uncanny echoes of the film Jean de Florette, in which villagers gloat at the back-breaking efforts of a rich outsider to carry water to his dying crops.
Last week Lord Powell, the quintessential English public servant, found himself cast in the humiliating role portrayed by Gérard Depardieu in the movie.
He was forced to make return trips by tractor to fill plastic containers with fresh water from a public fountain three miles away.
“Charles has spent all week going backwards and forwards filling our tanks,” his wife said. “Everybody is on holiday and the man who helps us has broken his foot. It’s considered shameful that people in Uganda have to queue for water. Here, 25 miles from Rome, we have to do the same.”
The Powells have two wells on their eight-acre estate but the water table is cursed with sulphur and hot springs. The Romans loved this area: the ancient spa at Cretone, three miles away, still provides mud baths and holistic massages — an attraction pointed out to Cherie Blair, the prime minister’s wife, when she stayed with the Powells last year. But the sulphur makes the well water smell of rotten eggs.
They pump water from a river but this, too, is sulphurous — and muddy. “I’ve had to replace the water treatment plant twice and now the pumps don’t work,” Powell said. “Last month two of my grandchildren were intoxicated by the water. The computers that regulate the chemicals in the water keep going wrong, so there was probably too much chlorine. My eight-month-old granddaughter came out in a terrible rash.”
Her son, a businessman in Hong Kong, took his children away. “I thought that was the last straw,” she said.
The real crunch came last week, however, with the imminent advent of three more grandchildren with their friends and families. The thought of them being contaminated and packing their bags filled her with despair.
The foul water was the only perceptible flaw when Powell bought the rundown estate in 1999. She admits that she acted “in a moment of passion” after falling in love with its 4th-century signal tower. But her surveyor was assured that funds had been allocated to connect her property and 400 others to the water mains in Palombara Sabina, a town five miles away, by 2000.
She redesigned and restored the villa as her “dream house”, filling it with the “bargains” that she had collected during her husband’s diplomatic postings. She began to assemble a menagerie, including chickens “that produce the finest eggs I have ever eaten” and an abandoned lamb that “follows me everywhere I go”.
The years passed but the water mains failed to materialise. Then work started in
2003 and finally the pipeline was ready last September. There was — and still is — only one snag: “They won’t turn the tap on.”
She outlines a conspiracy of Machiavellian complexity involving Massimo Fieramonti, the mayor of Palombara, the local socialists and a water company.
“All my trouble is because of the mayor,” she claimed. “He’s a small-town lawyer who has more power under decentralisation than the prime minister. He is worried that people like me come into the area and spoil their little system.”
She characterises that system as “favours for votes” and believes that the plan is to postpone the mains connection until next year’s mayoral election.
Exactly what lies at the heart of the dispute is unclear. There is a suggestion, however, that if the Powells and the other 400 outlying families are connected to the mains, everybody in the area — including the voters of Palombara, who at the moment get their water free — will have to install meters and start paying for supplies.
Powell has deployed her political contacts to try to resolve the dispute peacefully. Peter Mandelson, the former British cabinet minister, was glad to smooth the way when she first moved in by making an indirect approach to the mayor through his party, the Democrats of the Left (DS).
“I asked him to talk to Mr Ortelli, who was then the leader of the DS party,” said Powell. “Ortelli rang the local mayor and said, ‘Look, there is a person coming to the area who doesn’t know anybody. Please would you make sure to protect her’.” At their first meeting, however, the mayor cut her dead.
Last year Mandelson tried again, holding a dinner party in Rome at which he introduced her to two “very influential people” from the DS. They refused to take her calls.
Undeterred, she tried Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister. “I don’t know him very well, so I approached his diplomatic adviser. I had absolutely no answer.”
She wrote to the new head of the DS and the party secretary, to no avail. The mayor of Rome was “very polite” and tried to intervene, but with similar results.
She now suspects that her friendship with powerful figures may be more of a hindrance than a help. “The officials’ attitude is, ‘Who the hell does she think she is?’.”
Tired of being “fobbed off with bureaucratic excuses for four years” and with her second batch of grandchildren about to arrive, she issued an ultimatum: unless she had a promise that the water problem would be resolved by last Friday she would take the gloves off.
Dissatisfied with the officials’ response, she fired a shot across their bows — a scathing magazine article in which she said that she had doorstepped the mayor’s office to secure a meeting, only for him to “escape down the stairs”. She also denounced the local left-wing “cabal” and derided Italy’s lip service to the rule of law.
The riposte came on Wednesday from the head of the local carabinieri. “He said that I shouldn’t make such a fuss in the press, saying, ‘You don’t know the consequences’.” She took this as a threat.
“It’s difficult to imagine how bad it is,” said Caroline Cass, the British novelist who has been staying with the Powells. “I can see why Carla has come to the end of her tether, especially when threatened by the carabinieri.”
In Palombara Sabina last week Fieramonti refused to take calls from The Sunday Times. An acquaintance said the mayor was considering legal action against Powell: “He is very upset. He wants to protect his reputation.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one official said of Powell: “She arrived here expecting to be treated like a queen, but she forgot that Italy got rid of the monarchy in 1946.”
At the local carabinieri station, an officer was more emollient: “By the end of the month everything should be resolved. It’s just a question of the technicians making the link-up to the water supply.”
The traditional Ferragosto (August 15) holiday had slowed things down a little, he insisted. However, Powell is deaf to such assurances and excuses. She has heard too many of them.
If push comes to shove, would she think of leaving? “Never,” she said. “I would much rather die here with my olive trees and animals.”
Additional reporting: John Follain
Risks of buying abroad
The pitfalls that await the newcomer enamoured of a foreign property are legion but none is as outrageous as the legalised scam suffered by 15,000 foreigners on Spain’s Costa Blanca.
Under a law passed by the Valencia regional government, developers can appropriate privately owned land without compensation, giving the owners only three weeks’ notice.
Owners can also be charged for developing water and roads on the land they no longer occupy. Some have had to sell up the residue of their property for a tenth of the market value to meet this charge. One was forced to pay £500,000 for a public lavatory on his land.
In a damning report back to the European parliament last month, a delegation of MEPs cited cases of collusion between politicians and developers to extort the maximum from landowners in "a serious abuse of the most elementary rights of many thousands of European citizens".
One victim is Sue Foster, 53, from the Isle of Wight, who owned a £100,000 two-bedroom house at Calpe, near Benidorm, for 22 years and planned to retire there with her husband Nigel. Last month it was bulldozed.
"I was never told that my house was going to be destroyed," she said. "I am shocked and horrified. These people have stolen our future."
Spain is not alone in tripping up unwary foreigners. Bill Blevins, head of Blevins Franks, a specialist in advising people buying property overseas, says that in Portugal, Spain and France purchasers can be landed with the debt of a previous owner who has used the property as collateral.
Good relations with the local mayor are essential to gain planning permission in France and Spain, says Blevins, but it can still be costly. One expatriate in France won permission to breach a 400-year-old wall to build a wine cellar — but only after agreeing to renew the village’s water pump at a cost of £2,500.
Focus: Battle over a Roman paradise
Carla Powell has the ear of Europe's political elite but no one can help her in a battle over her Roman paradise
For nearly two decades Carla Powell was among the most forceful political hostesses in London. The fiery wife of Charles Powell, one of Margaret Thatcher’s inner circle, she was a networker with more connections than Google, accumulating the great and the good the way others collect Meissen china.
When Powell returned to her native Italy four years ago, contemplating a quiet retirement with her husband at a villa 25 miles from Rome, she rejoiced that she had put all the “bitchery of London” behind her.
She could not have been more wrong. Her arrival sparked a feud that flared into open hostilities last week between herself and the local mayor.
“This is war,” she declared yesterday. “I am down in the trenches and I haven’t slept for three nights. I don’t care if they kill me.”
This, remember, is a woman renowned for the passion of her vendettas, sometimes spending hours on the telephone denouncing her victims. She is also renowned for the eminence of her contacts.
Heads of state take her calls. Once, famously, her husband tried to interrupt her telephone conversation, pleading with her to get off the phone in case Thatcher wanted to speak to him. She replied sweetly: “But Charles, darling, this is the prime minister.”
The issue that has sent her to war now — mobilising her powerful contacts as she does so — is water. The Powells’ drama has uncanny echoes of the film Jean de Florette, in which villagers gloat at the back-breaking efforts of a rich outsider to carry water to his dying crops.
Last week Lord Powell, the quintessential English public servant, found himself cast in the humiliating role portrayed by Gérard Depardieu in the movie.
He was forced to make return trips by tractor to fill plastic containers with fresh water from a public fountain three miles away.
“Charles has spent all week going backwards and forwards filling our tanks,” his wife said. “Everybody is on holiday and the man who helps us has broken his foot. It’s considered shameful that people in Uganda have to queue for water. Here, 25 miles from Rome, we have to do the same.”
The Powells have two wells on their eight-acre estate but the water table is cursed with sulphur and hot springs. The Romans loved this area: the ancient spa at Cretone, three miles away, still provides mud baths and holistic massages — an attraction pointed out to Cherie Blair, the prime minister’s wife, when she stayed with the Powells last year. But the sulphur makes the well water smell of rotten eggs.
They pump water from a river but this, too, is sulphurous — and muddy. “I’ve had to replace the water treatment plant twice and now the pumps don’t work,” Powell said. “Last month two of my grandchildren were intoxicated by the water. The computers that regulate the chemicals in the water keep going wrong, so there was probably too much chlorine. My eight-month-old granddaughter came out in a terrible rash.”
Her son, a businessman in Hong Kong, took his children away. “I thought that was the last straw,” she said.
The real crunch came last week, however, with the imminent advent of three more grandchildren with their friends and families. The thought of them being contaminated and packing their bags filled her with despair.
The foul water was the only perceptible flaw when Powell bought the rundown estate in 1999. She admits that she acted “in a moment of passion” after falling in love with its 4th-century signal tower. But her surveyor was assured that funds had been allocated to connect her property and 400 others to the water mains in Palombara Sabina, a town five miles away, by 2000.
She redesigned and restored the villa as her “dream house”, filling it with the “bargains” that she had collected during her husband’s diplomatic postings. She began to assemble a menagerie, including chickens “that produce the finest eggs I have ever eaten” and an abandoned lamb that “follows me everywhere I go”.
The years passed but the water mains failed to materialise. Then work started in
2003 and finally the pipeline was ready last September. There was — and still is — only one snag: “They won’t turn the tap on.”
She outlines a conspiracy of Machiavellian complexity involving Massimo Fieramonti, the mayor of Palombara, the local socialists and a water company.
“All my trouble is because of the mayor,” she claimed. “He’s a small-town lawyer who has more power under decentralisation than the prime minister. He is worried that people like me come into the area and spoil their little system.”
She characterises that system as “favours for votes” and believes that the plan is to postpone the mains connection until next year’s mayoral election.
Exactly what lies at the heart of the dispute is unclear. There is a suggestion, however, that if the Powells and the other 400 outlying families are connected to the mains, everybody in the area — including the voters of Palombara, who at the moment get their water free — will have to install meters and start paying for supplies.
Powell has deployed her political contacts to try to resolve the dispute peacefully. Peter Mandelson, the former British cabinet minister, was glad to smooth the way when she first moved in by making an indirect approach to the mayor through his party, the Democrats of the Left (DS).
“I asked him to talk to Mr Ortelli, who was then the leader of the DS party,” said Powell. “Ortelli rang the local mayor and said, ‘Look, there is a person coming to the area who doesn’t know anybody. Please would you make sure to protect her’.” At their first meeting, however, the mayor cut her dead.
Last year Mandelson tried again, holding a dinner party in Rome at which he introduced her to two “very influential people” from the DS. They refused to take her calls.
Undeterred, she tried Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister. “I don’t know him very well, so I approached his diplomatic adviser. I had absolutely no answer.”
She wrote to the new head of the DS and the party secretary, to no avail. The mayor of Rome was “very polite” and tried to intervene, but with similar results.
She now suspects that her friendship with powerful figures may be more of a hindrance than a help. “The officials’ attitude is, ‘Who the hell does she think she is?’.”
Tired of being “fobbed off with bureaucratic excuses for four years” and with her second batch of grandchildren about to arrive, she issued an ultimatum: unless she had a promise that the water problem would be resolved by last Friday she would take the gloves off.
Dissatisfied with the officials’ response, she fired a shot across their bows — a scathing magazine article in which she said that she had doorstepped the mayor’s office to secure a meeting, only for him to “escape down the stairs”. She also denounced the local left-wing “cabal” and derided Italy’s lip service to the rule of law.
The riposte came on Wednesday from the head of the local carabinieri. “He said that I shouldn’t make such a fuss in the press, saying, ‘You don’t know the consequences’.” She took this as a threat.
“It’s difficult to imagine how bad it is,” said Caroline Cass, the British novelist who has been staying with the Powells. “I can see why Carla has come to the end of her tether, especially when threatened by the carabinieri.”
In Palombara Sabina last week Fieramonti refused to take calls from The Sunday Times. An acquaintance said the mayor was considering legal action against Powell: “He is very upset. He wants to protect his reputation.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one official said of Powell: “She arrived here expecting to be treated like a queen, but she forgot that Italy got rid of the monarchy in 1946.”
At the local carabinieri station, an officer was more emollient: “By the end of the month everything should be resolved. It’s just a question of the technicians making the link-up to the water supply.”
The traditional Ferragosto (August 15) holiday had slowed things down a little, he insisted. However, Powell is deaf to such assurances and excuses. She has heard too many of them.
If push comes to shove, would she think of leaving? “Never,” she said. “I would much rather die here with my olive trees and animals.”
Additional reporting: John Follain
Risks of buying abroad
The pitfalls that await the newcomer enamoured of a foreign property are legion but none is as outrageous as the legalised scam suffered by 15,000 foreigners on Spain’s Costa Blanca.
Under a law passed by the Valencia regional government, developers can appropriate privately owned land without compensation, giving the owners only three weeks’ notice.
Owners can also be charged for developing water and roads on the land they no longer occupy. Some have had to sell up the residue of their property for a tenth of the market value to meet this charge. One was forced to pay £500,000 for a public lavatory on his land.
In a damning report back to the European parliament last month, a delegation of MEPs cited cases of collusion between politicians and developers to extort the maximum from landowners in "a serious abuse of the most elementary rights of many thousands of European citizens".
One victim is Sue Foster, 53, from the Isle of Wight, who owned a £100,000 two-bedroom house at Calpe, near Benidorm, for 22 years and planned to retire there with her husband Nigel. Last month it was bulldozed.
"I was never told that my house was going to be destroyed," she said. "I am shocked and horrified. These people have stolen our future."
Spain is not alone in tripping up unwary foreigners. Bill Blevins, head of Blevins Franks, a specialist in advising people buying property overseas, says that in Portugal, Spain and France purchasers can be landed with the debt of a previous owner who has used the property as collateral.
Good relations with the local mayor are essential to gain planning permission in France and Spain, says Blevins, but it can still be costly. One expatriate in France won permission to breach a 400-year-old wall to build a wine cellar — but only after agreeing to renew the village’s water pump at a cost of £2,500.