MADRID, 15 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –
At the beginning of the trial being held against him, the defense of former Minister of Economy Rodrigo Rato has requested the annulment of the 2015 entry and registration order, which is at the origin of the case against him for an alleged illicit increase in his heritage, because it violated the right to defense and the inviolability of the home, the secrecy of communications and professional secrecy.
After the presentation of previous questions by the prosecutor, who has limited herself to providing a series of documentation, in the turn of Rato’s defense, she has maintained that the two documents on which the instructor relied to give the green light to that order, a “generic” tax risk report of the investigated carried out by the Tax Agency and the complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office, were not sufficient.
Regarding the first, he explained that it was a “very broad exhibition” that included “vague and imprecise actions, and lacking rigor.”
Regarding the complaint, he pointed out that it was “mendacious” and focused on the fact that the facts stated in it were “contradictory and also atypical.” “The text itself says one thing and the opposite on several occasions and in a critical reading it should have given rise to questions or verifications and not to automatism,” he added.
In this regard, he recalled that this complaint included the crime of removing assets, which was “radically false” and which therefore the Public Ministry itself withdrew. He has also fought the tax crimes attributed to him taking into account the voluntary declaration that the former president of the IMF made.
“The tax information that is reflected – in the Prosecutor’s complaint – as defrauded fees was irrelevant from a criminal point of view because they were voluntarily declared before the complaint,” he explained.
In this first session, Judge Ángela Acevedo has excused the accused José Manuel Fernández Norniella, who was CEO of Bankia, from attending the trial except on the day he must testify given his “delicate state of health.
The trial against the former super minister of Economy of the Aznar Government and more than a dozen people began this Friday in the Provincial Court of Madrid and will extend its sessions until the end of May.
The Prosecutor’s Office is requesting a prison sentence of approximately 70 years for him for 11 crimes against the Public Treasury, one crime of money laundering and another of business corruption in the context of the case regarding the alleged illicit increase of his assets. . He would have defrauded the Treasury of 8.5 million euros.
According to the indictment of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, collected by Europa Press, the man who was also president of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would have maintained hidden assets from the Public Treasury since 1999 through various companies with which he would have carried out continuous fraud activities. financial investment through bank accounts in the Bahamas, Switzerland, Monaco, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom, among other places.
The analysis of the seized documentation, the Prosecutor’s Office noted, made it possible to identify unjustified increases in assets between 2005 and 2015 for a total amount of 15.6 million euros, in addition to income from movable capital abroad that was also not declared to the Treasury.
The Prosecutor’s Office also recalled that Rato took advantage of the tax amnesty in November 2012 and pointed out that he omitted any reference to several companies he owned, thus declaring assets abroad of 115,333.50 euros and paying the Spanish Treasury €11,533.35.
Anti-corruption indicated in this regard that Rato, “far from having regularized either administratively or, even less, criminally, his fortune, he actually used the special tax declaration (DTE) as a vehicle for laundering or cleaning up the illicit defrauded contributions that he carried.” for years because of its foreign heritage”.
