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MAGICAL The Olive Press News Editor recalls how he fell in love with Mijas when he got married there
Mijas
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THE SECRETS OF MIJAS
May 2025
Forget the donkey rides, getting married the only way to truly experien is mountain town, ce the romantic writes Dilip Kuner
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EXCLUSIVE
Jody partner: I’m innocent
I
OLIVE PRESS
T was back in Sandra and the early 1990s that I first discovered magical pueblo the We were so of Mijas. place we chose enchanted with the ried life and tied it to begin our marthe knot at the hall in 1995. town Not at the traditional whitewashed building that still stands proudly the heart of the in village, but the ern opulent modmuch marble,replacement - with so a wedding thanit felt more befitting nearby register the dingy cramped office. OK, the paperwork may have proved horrendous - it took us nine months to cut the red tape, with me being in Africa and Sandra born carrying passport - but we finally madea French We were married it. or, no less, after by the deputy maypaperwork havingthey finally found our somehow the morning of the big day. lost it on
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THE alleged mastermind behind one of Spain’s biggest investment frauds has insisted he’s innocent. Darren Kirby, who founded infamous Continental Wealth Management (CWM), told the Olive Press he left Spain with ‘just €50’ in his pocket. This was despite his firm leaving hundreds of elderly expats ‘around €35 million’ out of pocket Vol. 19 Issue 468 www.theolivepress.es May 7th - May 20th 2025 FREE when it collapsed in 2017. Having fled Spain, first for Australia and then Cambodia, he is now living in LonShining a light on sensational Costa del Sol corruption charges don, working in pubs. The 60-year-old told the Olive Press this week, he was ‘aware’ of various lawsuits against his former firm and that his ex-partner Jody Smart (top) had just been sentenced to three years in prison. However, he insisted he was innocent and ‘there was no fraud committed by CWM’.
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LAMPPOST LADY
Mayor facing prison and resignation calls over claims he paid ‘intimate female friend’ thousands to check lampposts and flowerpots
THE mayor of Estepona is facing up to three years in jail over the misappropriation of public money. Jose Garcia Urbano will be forced to answer questions over why his town hall paid an alleged lover to ‘check lamposts and flowerpots’. The PP ‘heavyweight’ has been accused of handing public money to the ‘intimate female friend’ in 2023. The judge at Estepona’s Court Number 5 will task a jury to decide if it was lawful to pay the woman €3,642 a month to undertake the bizarre task. Urbano, who has overseen Estepona since 2011, is accused of ‘taking advantage of his position as mayor to help out an intimate friend financially.’ In documents seen by the Olive Press, the case stems from a series of lurid allega-
These involved lurid wife-swapping sessions at the castle/hotel Urbano owned in Monda, near Marbella. tions made by the woman - dubbed However the judge eventually the ‘Amante La Farolera’, or ‘lamp- s h e l v e d post lover’on Spanisk TV - and her the case on the policeman ex-husband last year. The claims by the former Policia Lo- g r o u n d s cal are linked to Urbano allegedly the uncoercing them into a sordid menage u s u a l relationa trois over 18 months. They alleged that Urbano used a ship had combination of threats and favours b e e n - including a free beachside apart- ‘consensual’. ment - to control them. The policeman, who had moved from W h i l e Cordoba to take the job, claimed he the maywas forced into lots of degrading sex or has spoken acts involving the mayor. publicly claiming he was ‘being PROOF: Telecinco showed payslips of Urbano’s smeared’, ‘lover’, while (left) a handy diagram of his affairs Judge Inigo Jose Villar, decided there were other that she ‘never once set foot in the charges that needed to be filed. town hall’ during this period. In particular, how the woman, ini- “I didn’t even go into the office tials ‘CPB’, took home over €5,376 once,” she told the judge. of taxpayer’s money for just 48 days “When we saw each other he (Urbaof work between February 13 and no) gave me money so that I wouldn’t March 31, 2023. go, because he knew my financial CPB testified in an earlier hearing state, which wasn’t good. “I couldn’t afford monthly rent so he offered me this position.” Estepona PSOE Councillor Emma Molina this week told the Olive Press she had called for Urbano’s immediThe Scandinavian energy supplier in Spain ate resignation over the ‘very serious’ charges. JOIN US & ENJOY THE BENEFITS! “Handing out public money MULTILINGUAL to a person he had an intiCUSTOMER SERVICE mate relationship with – and who never worked there – is GET YOUR ELECTRICITY surely enough to make him BILL IN YOUR LANGUAGE stand down,” she insisted. She added that the PSOE CALL US FOR FREE had expelled its own memFROM ABROAD bers over similar serious allegations. 100% GREEN ENERGY The mayor, a former notary EXCLUSIVE OFFER and married father-of-four, €30 WELCOME DISCOUNT has consistently maintained the allegations against him are ‘baseless’ and are ‘spuriously motivated to damage info@energynordic.com my personal image and politSCAN ME AND OBTAIN 900 696 820 (freephone) ical career.’ 30€ WELCOME DISCOUNT By Walter Finch
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GRAPHIC CREDIT: Telecinco
The former financial advisor also claimed he had made ‘no money’ from the offshore investment scheme that he set up in Alicante in 2010. In a bombshell phone interview from the UK, he insisted his ex-partner Jody, now Jody Pearson, had ‘stolen everything from me’. “She even took my Savile Row suit and a sculpture of my baby daughter when she was just six months old,” he claimed. Kirby also insisted he ‘transferred everything’ into Jody’s name in 2015 on the advice of lawyers. She was left with ‘all the assets, totally, completely,’ he claimed. This even included the Costa Blanca villa that Kirby had been ‘planning to retire in’. “Everyone says I ran away – I didn't run away,” he insisted this week, speaking publicly for the first time. “But as soon as I left, Jody stripped all my assets, the cars – and a lot more too.” The Olive Press will be revealing more of his sensational claims about the CWM scandal over the coming weeks.
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