The money was there. It just wasn't in the right place, on the right day.
“Ilan, they're taking my deposit.”
Alon called me on a Thursday evening. He didn't shout. He spoke slowly, like someone trying not to fall apart mid-sentence. “I have the money. It's sitting in an account in Israel. And I'm about to lose twenty-five thousand euros because it's in Israel.”
Alon is forty-seven, a CFO at a software company. A man who spends all day managing cash flow, models and timelines. He doesn't get carried away by a presentation. He read, he asked, he built a file with three scenarios, and he even flew to Lisbon for three days to see neighborhoods on foot and not on a map. A small apartment of 250 thousand euros, close to the center. A reasonable yield now, and in ten years a place his daughter could live in.
Someone explained the order to him: first a Portuguese tax number, then a bank account, then a contract. He got the number within a few days. He opened the account at a Lisbon branch during that same visit. The clerk smiled, collected documents, and said a week or two.
He signed the preliminary contract, the CPCV, three weeks later. A ten percent deposit - twenty-five thousand euros that left his account that same day. Ninety days until signing the deed of sale before the notary.
Ninety days. Alon smiled when he saw the date. He had managed two-year projects.
What he didn't know was that the bank's clock is not synchronized with the contract's clock.
In the third week an email arrived: confirmation of the source of funds was required. Alon sent a payslip. They replied that it didn't explain the amount. He explained that the money came from three sources - exercising stock options, the sale of an apartment he inherited in Haifa, and a loan from his father. Three sources, three paper trails, all in Hebrew.
Then the chain began. Notarial translation. Apostille. Accountant's confirmation. Confirmation from the bank in Israel that the money did indeed move from there to there. Each round took a week to a week and a half, and in each round a new question was asked that nobody had asked in the previous one. He would send a document at two in the morning and get a reply a few days later asking for a document he had already sent in a different format.
Alon told me the hardest part wasn't the delay. It was the feeling of being interrogated. A man who has paid his taxes on time all his life, who has nothing to hide, who manages the finances of an entire company, found himself explaining to a clerk he didn't know, who spoke very basic English, where his money came from.
Meanwhile the Israeli side woke up too. The compliance department at his bank wanted to understand where 225 thousand euros were going, why, and to whom.
On day fifty-eight Alon did what any sensible person would do. He asked: if the Portuguese account is holding things up, why not transfer the money directly to the seller's account?
It sounded simple. It wasn't.
The transfer left Israel on day eighty-two, after two weeks of approvals on the Israeli side. It reached the seller's bank and stopped there. The receiving bank opened an inquiry: who is sending, why, what is the transaction, and what is the connection between the sender and the account holder. The questions were directed at the seller, who knew nothing about them, who didn't have a single document from Alon's entire file, and whose bank had never had the sender as a customer. On day eighty-nine the money came back.
That was the moment Alon understood that the wall was not the account. The wall was that nobody managed to explain fast enough where the money came from, no matter which desk the question was placed on.
On day eighty-six he had already asked for a one-month postponement. The seller refused. Not out of hostility; she herself had signed to buy another apartment with that money, and she had no room to move.
On day ninety he did not show up at the notary.
Under Article 442 of the Portuguese Civil Code, the deposit in a preliminary contract is not a refundable security deposit. If the buyer does not complete, the seller keeps it. If the seller withdraws, she returns double. A symmetrical mechanism, and it works exactly as written.
That is where I came in, too late.
I sat on the file for three days before I said a word to Alon, because I wanted to be sure I wasn't missing an opening. There wasn't one. His contract had no condition regarding financing or availability of funds. There was no extension clause, not even fifteen days on written notice. There was a clean commitment to show up and pay on the date.
And this is the part that keeps bothering me: there were at least three points at which this could have been prevented, and all of them were before the signing, not after.
The first, a source-of-funds file prepared in advance - translated, certified, arranged so that a stranger understands it in five minutes. For a client with three sources of income this is not a formality, it is weeks of work.
The second, a funds route set in advance. With Israeli buyers I prefer that the money land in Portugal through the escrow account of a local lawyer, and not on the day of signing but well before it. Not because it saves the compliance check, which is done there too, but because it is done with a regulated party that already knows the client and the deal, instead of with a clerk who sees a foreign sum landing with one of his customers. And in addition, the taxes that must be paid right before signing have to come out of somewhere in Portugal.
The third, an extension mechanism in the contract. I almost always include it for an Israeli buyer, because I know that between Israel and Europe stand two compliance departments, and neither of them commits to a timetable.
In the end we got back part of the deposit. The seller preferred an agreed sum over a prolonged correspondence with a lawyer, and it was settled in a compromise. He didn't lose everything.
He lost the apartment. And also, as he told me, the confidence that he is a person who knows how to manage a process.
Alon wasn't wrong about the value, or the neighborhood, or the yield. He was wrong about one assumption: that moving money is a technical act.
It isn't. It is the longest regulatory procedure in the deal, and the only one you have no control over.
The question I would ask in your place
- Through which account exactly is my money supposed to reach signing day, and when does it need to be there, not on signing day but before it?
- Is my source-of-funds file already translated and certified, or do I plan to start dealing with it when they ask?
- What happens in my contract if I'm thirty days late - is there a written extension mechanism, or am I simply in breach?
Stories are based on real situations, with identifying details changed. Not legal advice.
Translated from the Hebrew original. עברית