From the outside he was a solvent, successful businessman from Figueres, who was very good at business. He had a high pace of life. He enjoyed the best cars, the best houses and the best schools for his children. In fact, he had a mansion valued at 850,000 euros and another was being built. A life in style.
But in reality he was the head of a criminal organization that mainly exported marijuana from l'Alt Empordà to Marseille and laundered the profits through the purchase of luxury properties and apparently legal businesses.
A joint operation by the Mossos d'Esquadra and the Customs Surveillance Service of the Tax Agency has made it possible to dismantle this criminal network and arrest not only the head of the organization, a resident of Spanish nationality from Figueres with no criminal record, but the entire network. of the group.
From the lowest echelon, made up of the gardeners who were in charge of the marijuana plantations, to those who were in charge of renting the warehouses and houses to develop the in-door plantations and to those who modified the documentation to give the appearance of legality to the rentals or opening businesses.
In total, there have been fourteen detainees, nine men and five women between 23 and 74 years old, of whom eight have been imprisoned. One of those arrested is one of those responsible for an agency in Figueres.
The head of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Girona police region, sub-inspector Carles Martínez, explains that the importance of this operation does not lie so much in the dismantled plantations and the confiscated drugs, valued at more than 1.1 million euros, but in the fact that it has been possible to identify the members of this pyramidal organization, which unlike many others, was "autochthonous."
"We have identified all the people who participated in the organization, not only those who watered the plants, but also those who were in charge of looking for warehouses or houses to be able to install the in-door plantations and the companies that invested the money they received from the organization and laundered in false invoices or the purchase of apartments," explains Martínez, who highlights the fact that it was possible to demonstrate that it was a criminal organization "from beginning to end."
From the head of the organization, with no previous record, the head of the Combined Unit of the Customs Surveillance Service, Antonio Lajusticia, explains that his way of proceeding to launder money responds to a "classic and elementary typology" in this type of organizations. All of his assets have been seized and brought to justice. One of the businessman's businesses was focused on the markets sector.
"They registered under various Social Security professional headings and invoiced; they did not practice those professions but they kept accounts and acted as businessmen. To do so, they contacted companies in the area to whom they invoiced and those companies, in turn, They deposited the money into the checking accounts and the money was laundered," he explains. "They were legal companies that participated in the game," adds Lajusticia.
They could use that money freely or request loans because the financial entities saw that they had a certain solvency and thus could introduce that money into the legal economic system. The agency was the one that kept the accounting and was aware that this billing did not correspond to reality.
The investigation is not finished and more arrests are not ruled out. The Customs Surveillance Service has proceeded to dump the computers intervened in the operation that was carried out on November 9 with fifteen entries and records in the municipalities of Figueres, Sant Pere Pescador, Vilacolum, Vilamacolum, l'Escala, Castelló d'Empúries i Girona. They are also following the trail of payments and checks, which could lead to new investigations. There could be three or four more businessmen.
At the end of November 2022, a robbery occurred inside two industrial warehouses in Vilamalla, where there were two indoor marijuana plantations with a very sophisticated and specific level of installation. "It was such a well-made installation that it was difficult to detect; it didn't even smell," Martínez explains.
The greenhouses were built with thermal and light insulators, which prevented excesses of temperature or light that would raise suspicions about the location of the plantation. They had circular water pipes, which allowed more efficiency in irrigation.
The agents managed to dismantle the plantation with about 3,500 plants. And at the end of August, two more seizures of marijuana plants were made in Empuriabrava.
