The directors and employees of the banks who, according to the Civil Guard and the National Police, nurtured the criminal organization attributed to the television producer José Luis Moreno – arrested a year ago and currently charged – were a “fundamental” piece for the success in an operation that, investigators insist, reported nearly two million euros to the network.
This is the conclusion of the last report sent to the court, dated June 29, to which EL MUNDO has had access, where it is recorded that the intervention of these workers -a total of 18 throughout the country- was rewarded with all kinds of gifts that ranged from state-of-the-art appliances to more modest ones such as the well-known roomba vacuum cleaner, high-end cars, paid vacations, concert tickets and VIP boxes. Receiving one or the other depended on the degree of involvement with the network.
The Armed Institute and the National Police accompany the dossier sent to the magistrate of the National Court Ismael Moreno of whatsapp conversations, telephone interventions as well as photographs. They conclude that the plot, dubbed the ‘Titella case’, used bank workers from all over Spain to obtain irregular loans and launder money of illicit origin.
In the delivery and selection of the “gifts”, as the criminal organization refers to them, there were distinctions. According to the documentation, the employee of a Liberbank branch was the employee at the service of the network to whom the alleged illicit behavior reported the most benefits. It was the director of the office located in a central street in Madrid.
His level of participation was more than compensated, as detailed in the dossier. “The involvement of the director of the Liberbank Office in the operations that the organization is carrying out is so great that (the plot) calls him Chief, as if he were just another employee of it.”
In compensation for his participation in the financing and movement of capital of the companies of the criminal organization allegedly led by the showman, he would have received football tickets in a box for his family and friends (in a match at the Bernabéu that faced Real Madrid with Girona), a state-of-the-art flat-screen TV, electrical appliances and a ham.
In addition, he also enjoyed -indicates the dossier- a paid vacation for him and his family in a well-known hotel in Benidorm.
Another of the investigated directors received a Mini brand car for his contribution. More modest was the gift with which the network ‘rewarded’ the director of a Banco Popular de Valladolid branch who, the report indicates, received a Roomba brand vacuum cleaner. Other employees of different branches would have received transfers of 2,000 euros for their favors.
Through gifts and cash, the criminal organization would have managed to get bank directors and employees to give loans to instrumental companies without activity and collaborate to, the report specifies, “encourage the concealment” of these companies, “launder funds” through transfers and transfers to other banks and execute “cash deposits without identifying the legitimate origin of that money”.
“They would use different companies and make the banking entity believe that they are serious and have sufficient solvency, using the employees of the financial entities themselves, ‘buying’ them with money or gifts. These employees, without whom it would not be possible to carry out the claims of those under investigation, in turn, they would report on the situation of the companies at all times and would follow the instructions of the person under investigation”.
In their conclusions, the investigators once again accredit the existence, they assure, of a criminal organization “that operates at an international level, whose criminal activity is diversified into different specialties from fraud and fraud against banking entities, to the falsification of bank effects such as checks and promissory notes, in addition to the subsequent laundering of the profits obtained, with a structure divided into operating cells and clearly hierarchical, in which we find José Luis Moreno as leader as a well-known public figure, he would lend his name as a business card, to that it would be much easier for them to obtain financing from banks and he would also be in charge of presenting the film or television project for which financing was required”.
The operation used by the organization consisted, the final report states, in the use of front companies, “all of them managed by figureheads, as has been reflected throughout this report, based on the observation of the communications, on the information received of the AEAT, the verification of the registered offices of the companies investigated, and the analysis of the documentation and devices seized during the searches, confirming that a large number of these companies lack real activity and that some of their figurehead administrators have various police record for forgery and fraud”.
The investigation was born in 2018 as a result of several complaints from banking entities in which it was stated that, by abusing banking operations, this organization had managed to defraud more than 1,300,000 euros.
The organization allegedly took advantage of its business network of more than 700 commercial companies to launder money from drug trafficking to third parties. They simulated an activity that was nonexistent to justify the millionaire cash income that was generated from drug sales.
During the investigation, an intervention was carried out in which they seized more than one million euros in cash from a mule. She worked for this organization transporting, in vehicles with double bottoms, large amounts of cash throughout the national territory from the sale of drugs inside and outside of Spain.
José Luis Moreno remains charged in the case for crimes of money laundering, fraud and criminal organization. The ventriloquist has tried up to two times to file the proceedings but the Justice has not proved him right.
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