This morning, the Criminal Court No. 25 of Barcelona, the same one that handed down the sentence, has received the appeal of Josep Santacana, sentenced to three years and three months in prison plus solidarity compensation to the Bank of Luxembourg (BdLux ) of 6,620,127.60 euros. The 56-page text lists in ten points the reasons for considering it an irrational sentence against Santacana and that it violates his fundamental rights, makes an error in the assessment of the evidence and violates the law. In addition, it points out that the ruling was issued after closing an agreement between the Prosecutor's Office and the private prosecution with Arantxa and two other defendants, who gave incriminating statements against Santancana in exchange for procedural benefits: none of the three is now at risk of going to prison. .
The sentence, handed down on January 15 of this year, condemned Josep Santacana as a necessary cooperator in a crime of asset seizure and insolvency punishable without the concurrence of circumstances modifying criminal responsibility. However, the appeal states that “the perpetrator of the crime is her ex-wife, Aránzazu Sánchez Vicario, for having hidden her assets in order to avoid the collection of a debt owned by her for a total amount of 7,563,969 €.44. The debt was originally contracted by Ms. Sánchez Vicario with the Tax Agency and subsequently with BdLux when the guarantee that it provided to guarantee the aforementioned debt before the AEAT was executed in 2010.
The appeal presented by the lawyer Juan Segarra explains that Arantxa recognized the facts – the sale of his properties and the non-payment of the debt – but that, given that at the trial he provided seven blocks of documents that pointed to Santacana as the “ideatrix” of a criminal plan to steal someone else's assets, the pact with the accusations went much further: it included the complement of incriminating her ex-husband. A.E.H.M. got into that car during the oral hearing. and R.M.M., the appeal states, with the same incriminating story. The three saw their sentence request reduced: Arantxa, from four years, to two and including Santacana as a joint debtor with the bank; A.E.H.M, from 3 years and 6 months to 1 year and 3 months and although just over two million euros were claimed in civil liability, the accusations waived civil action; Finally, R.M.M. saw the charges dropped and was acquitted.
The appealed sentence bases the conviction of Josep Santacana on establishing that since November 2009 it was he who assumed the de facto administration of all of his wife's assets and indicates that "he devised and directed all the operations regarding her numerous assets" because Arantxa “he did not have the capacity or knowledge to direct the operations” and that “It is amply proven that Josep Santacana was the person who managed his wife's assets since he took control of it in November 2009, and that he devised and carried out carry out the depatrimonialization operations.”
And it is here where Segarra finds what he calls a “deficit of rationality” in the sentence due to contradictions such as the following. One is that it declares proven that it was Arantxa who “following the guidelines of the accused and under the guidelines of her husband, carried out the operations to decapitalize her numerous assets,” while in the legal foundations it states that it was Santacana who “devised and carried out carry out all depatrimonialization operations.” In several places we read that Arantxa was the executor "under the instructions of her husband and in collaboration with the other accused (...) they devised a plan consisting of decapitalizing her numerous assets" or "The accused, always under the instructions of her husband and using of the accused (…), carried out numerous sales operations in order to obtain money and hide it.”
Likewise, he adds that Bonaventura Castellanos, who was Arantxa's lawyer when his father administered the assets and a person of his utmost confidence, declared in court that "the purchase of Huslia [a Uruguayan company] and the contribution of real estate was already made by order of Arantxa”, that “as of 2009 Arantxa administered and managed companies”, that “Arantxa had knowledge before, during and after” and that “accompanied her to Uruguay and Switzerland to meet the managers”. Castellanos ceased to be linked to the management of Arantxa's assets in April 2010, when his assets were still intact.
Another contradiction with the story that Santacana “carried out all the operations” is that the ruling only recognizes his presence as proven in three: the collection of a family exclusive for the amount of €24,420 through his company; showing the house in Formentera to the Atsbury real estate company, which in the end was not the one that ended up selling it, and the sale of the house in Andorra on behalf of his Arantxa, receiving one of the checks (€87,800) to deposit it in the account owned by Arantxa in Fimarge. The second, of €108,000, which was deposited by order of Arantxa into her ANDBANK account, also owned exclusively by the tennis player.
He also protests against Santacana's defenselessness in the face of the impossibility of contradiction, which he could not propose in his defense brief and conduct exculpatory evidence in the face of the documentary provided by Arantxa in his defense brief. Nor could Santacana's lawyer question her about those documents, given that she had the right not to testify as an accused: “What was the origin of that documentary? where or how was it obtained? By whom was it completed? under what circumstances? By order of whom? on what date? Is there another previous or subsequent documentary that questions it?”, the appeal asks. Finally, he was not granted the right to testify last, a question requested in the trial "given the evidence of the existence of an agreement against him", so "he could not defend himself against the accusations and incriminating stories that were produced with later by the co-defendants Hermosilla and Marín,” the lawyer laments.
