I wanted to buy a new car, and I was happy with my choice. Until the day the police knocked on his door. He didn’t do anything wrong, but he was left without his car and with a debt to pay.
Tiago Castro was 23 years old, born in Calda das Taipas, played for Vitória de Setúbal and had a BMW series 1 car. He decided to exchange it for a second-hand Mercedes in 2019.
It cost 35 thousand euros, or 27 thousand euros if you delivered the car you had, the BMW, which had a commercial value of 8 thousand euros. To purchase the car, the young man asked for a loan that would be paid off in 3 years, says .
“The car was very good. I made 5/6 Setúbal-Guimarães, Guimarães-Setúbal trips a month and the car gave me a much more comfortable and much easier trip”, he says. I was happy with my purchase — until December 29, 2020.
“That day, I woke up with my father calling me into the room, I’ll never forget, saying ‘Tiago, Tiago, The police are outside and want to talk to you‘ and I was like ‘the police? But I didn’t do anything’”, says the football player.
“We came to seize the car, we have a warrant to seize the car here,” the police told him. “My father was white and I couldn’t speakit was a huge shock, because a person thinks it only happens to others“, says the young man.
The car, which had been purchased at a physical dealership and completely legally, was seized. “It clearly appears that documents were falsified,” the lawyer tells CNN Rita Garcia Pereira.
Custódio Gonçalves, the former Mercedes owner, presented a Single Car Document without reservation of ownership, which means that the car legitimately belonged to him.
“The owner of the car called me, the owner of the dealership gave me my cell phone number, and he called me saying that it couldn’t be, that there was some mistakewho was a good person, who could give me the money or two cars, everything was fine, and I said ‘ok, let’s sort it out’”, says Tiago.
Weeks later, the player received a package at home from an asset recovery company that returned the car’s license plates and informed him that the Mercedes was repatriated to France, where the vehicle was seized in a legal case brought by Mercedes itself.
A month before the car was sold to Tiago, when it already had a Portuguese license plate, in May 2019, installments are no longer paid and Mercedes activated the courts to recover the car. The manager of the defaulting company was neither more nor less than Custodio Gonçalvesthe man who sold the car in Portugal to Tiago Castro.
“From what I know, in the booklet, when a person has a credit, when purchasing a car, it says there is reservation of title. In this case, no. The booklet was clean, straightnever crossed our minds. We were surprised of course, how could something like this happen? I don’t understand”, says Tiago’s father.
The lawyer says that there are several hypotheses for the issue: “one of them is that Custódio Gonçalves made a legal transaction that removed the car from the legal sphere of society and, at the same time, erased the reservation of ownership with Mercedes. Just for forgery. There is no other possibility, and the registry in Portugal accepted it as such. He considered the forged document to be good.”
“The logic of the system is: the brand, whatever it may be, comes to collect the vehicle and the injured party can ask for compensation from whoever deceived or injured them. The problem with this system, which is the same here as in France, is If the person who was injured later has no assets, it will be almost impossible for the injured party to receive compensation.“, concludes the lawyer.
Currently, Tiago pays a monthly installment of €500, with a year and a half of debts ahead. There are no signs of the car.
