Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias is already 28 years old, he is no longer the teenager who astonished all of Spain for his ability to pass himself off as a government collaborator, CNI agent, or a boy close to the PP, to deceive businessmen of all kinds. Almost a decade later he continues to face the Justice and get into some trouble or another. Today begins the fourth trial against him in the Provincial Court of Madrid. In this he faces 6 years in prison for fraud, falsehood and usurpation of public functions. However, the one known as 'little Nicolás' has already had two sentences, with a total of 4 years and nine months in prison.
The young Gómez Iglesias has been dodging prison for eight years but time is running out and his options are getting smaller. For the other two convictions – for a third trial he was acquitted – the Supreme Court is pending a ruling on his appeals. If after this trial he were convicted, the options of the Prosecutor's Office requesting his admission to preventive detention due to a flight risk increases.
The first conviction was imposed for falsifying the DNI so that a friend of his would appear for him at the Selectivity exam. The second came for posing as an envoy of King Felipe VI and the then Vice President of the Government Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría.
Starting today, a court of three magistrates will listen to him again and will see all the evidence to determine if he posed as a government adviser to defraud a businessman, Javier Martínez de la Hidalga.
At just 20 years old, Gómez Iglesias – according to the indictment of the Prosecutor's Office – chose his victim. This businessman wanted to sell a property, the Alamedilla estate, in the province of Toledo. In that first contact, he told her to call on behalf of the Government, that he was interested in buying the land to in turn sell it to someone from Equatorial Guinea.
After that first bait was fixed, Gómez Iglesias gave the businessman a series of dossiers with the letterhead of the Government of Spain and made him believe that the Tax Agency was going to seize all his accounts for a pending matter. To supposedly do her a favor, he told her that he should empty his accounts and open them in someone else's name, him for example.
His entire plan was seasoned with a high-end car, a driver and police lights, as well as a profile on social networks with photographs of politicians of all kinds and conditions, to make the story more credible. Martínez de la Hidalga had no suspicions until they arrived at the bank branch to carry out the operation, supposedly supervised and endorsed by the Government.
But the director of the bank was not so clear. When he asked for his DNI to open the account in his name, he discovered that Gómez Iglesias was only twenty years old and had no university studies. The coverage of him being an agent of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) was leaking. The director of the bank warned his client that the intention of withdrawing 500,000 euros from his account was going to create an alarm for the money laundering prevention service.
He managed to dissuade, at least momentarily, the businessman from doing the operation. However, he could not prevent him from withdrawing 25,000 euros in cash in case the Treasury, as the young man had warned him, was going to seize everything.
Gómez Iglesias convinced him –as a favor- to take care of that money while everything was arranged. The businessman gave it to him but 72 hours later he began to suspect that perhaps it was all a scam. The next day, on October 14, 2014, Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias, alias Little Nicolás, was arrested. That's where his story began, which has lasted almost a decade.
