SANTO DOMINGO.- 70% of the complaints filed with the National Institute for the Protection of Consumer Rights (Proconsumidor) in the last two years have been motivated by the increase applied to housing projects, said the director of that agency, Eddy Alcántara, yesterday.
He explained that the most frequent cases received by that institution are related to duplicate marketing, construction defects, and overvaluation of the consumer price index in the value of housing.
In an interview on the program "El Día" broadcast by Telesistema, Alcántara noted that Proconsumidor has received more than 1,100 complaints of this nature in two years, of which more than 70% of the cases have been due to increases in housing costs.
He clarified that when there is any type of fraud, the case falls under the jurisdiction of the criminal courts.
"Seventy percent of those claims have been due to the increases, and we have received hundreds of claims and complaints that we have not statistically established because they have purely ordinary punishable classifications, that is to say, when we talk about fraud, we refer it to the Public Prosecutor's Office, which is the one that has to act accordingly," the official indicated.
When referring to increases in the cost of housing when it is stipulated or not in the contract between the supplier and the buyer, Alcántara specified that said increase must be linked to the indicators established by the National Statistics Office (ONE).
"When it is stipulated, we have clearly established that if the consumer is going to assume it as stipulated in the contract, it has to be the increase to the inflation established by the ONE for the rest that remains to be built of the total property because many times they want to apply an increase when a construction is still projected on a specific date and at the time of notifying the increase, not even the first rod has been put in," he pointed out.
He added that 90% of the complaints received by Proconsumidor have been resolved through conciliation.
"Statistically, Proconsumidor has about 96% of those decisions in favor of consumers because many times they try to apply a disproportionate increase abusively, which is sometimes not stipulated in the contract and therefore cannot be included," he explained.
Eddy Alcántara explained that the Dominican Association of Housing Builders and Promoters (Acoprovi) is the institution that has taken the fewest cases to Proconsumidor, and of those that have arrived through that channel, 95% have been conciliated.
"There are few cases that have come from Acoprovi because we have a committee that discusses the mechanisms that need to be used in these cases," he concluded.
