IN the snapshot David Curry received, the 1996 Range Rover gleamed in a glossy sand-coloured finish.
But the promise of its delivery has sparked a transatlantic row between the American collector and a Spanish dealership, Garage Belle Epoque, which has allegedly kept the car worth €18,000.
“It feels like a hostage situation,” Curry, an estate agent from New York told the Olive Press, adding he has now involved Spanish police.
The legal row follows a year of acrimony with the garage owners, who have now launched a libel claim and lodged the money with an Alicante court.
“It’s like someone breaks into your house, you call him a bad name, and then he gets upset,” Curry insisted this week.
He bought the car in October 2024, paying €14,000 with another €4,000 for a custom paint job in March 2025.
The agreement was to pick it up in Barcelona in April, for a month-long road trip through France, before exporting it home.
But a day before departure, the realtor was told the vehicle could not ‘legally enter’ Barcelona due to EU environmental regulations.
After reluctantly renting another vehicle, it was agreed the car would be shipped to the US the following month.
However, Curry claims delays continued to pile up, and communication became increasingly sporadic with ‘no updates on progress’.
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Tempers finally snapped and garage owner Jose Pombo told Curry he no longer wished to do business with him. The garage drew up a cancellation agreement in June, committing to a full refund within 15 days.
But the money never arrived and Curry was eventually told the refund would come once the vehicle was sold to another buyer, to avoid the garage ‘having to pay VAT twice’.
Eventually, after a series of heated exchanges, seen by The Olive Press, Pombo said the €18,000 would be deposited with an Alicante courthouse – and Curry would only receive it ‘after due process was completed’.
The garage claimed Curry was ‘an impossible client, rude and antagonistic’, stressing it takes ‘a long time’ to restore a classic car and prepare it for transatlantic shipment.
Pombo said a lawsuit was filed against Curry in Alicante’s Court No. 4 based on a now-deleted Reddit post which tarnished the firm’s reputation, describing it as a ‘scam’.
“This wasn’t fraud,” Pombo told the Olive Press. “This was just a client being impossibly difficult.”
While The Olive Press has been unable to get copies of the legal claims, we have discovered the garage was in litigation with another US-based group, although the firm insisted both a complaint and an appeal have been shelved by a judge.
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