La Ley Gioconda

Gioconda is the asset-liquidation platform of La Ley, the Spanish legal publisher within Wolters Kluwer, and its pitch is aimed at the professionals who run insolvencies rather than at bargain hunters. What that buys a purchaser is infrastructure: the operator claims more than fifty local support centres across the peninsula and a workforce of specialists able to inventory and value different asset types on site. Be realistic about current volume, though — at the time of writing only a handful of lots were live, so this is a platform whose value depends on the estates its legal-sector clients bring to it.

What comes up

• Property: the standing category, from insolvency and enforcement estates.
• Production units (unidades productivas): going concerns sold whole, which is the transaction Spanish insolvency law most encourages.
• Machinery and tools: plant and workshop equipment from the same estates.
• Vehicles: company cars and commercial vehicles.
• IT and furniture: the office contents that come with a closure.

How the bidding works

Registration is required to bid, and the platform is built around traceability of transactions and bids — the operator's own emphasis, and a reasonable one in a market where insolvency sales are challenged after the fact. Assets are published as each liquidation comes to market rather than to a fixed calendar.

What to check before you bid

Check how many lots are actually live before investing time: this platform's catalogue is thin compared with the established Spanish specialists, and a category listed in the menu is not the same as stock in it. Where a unidad productiva is offered, understand that you are buying a business with its contracts and possibly its employment obligations, not a pile of equipment — that is a transaction for a lawyer, not a bidder. Everything is published in Spanish.