The decision of the judge in the case against Alberto González Amador to open a separate piece in which to investigate whether Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner committed other crimes other than those he has acknowledged represents a turn that will delay, at best, for the businessman, the judgment of conformity that he wanted to sign as soon as possible. In the new judicial field, a figure emerges that until now played a secondary role, the health giant Quirón, whom the popular accusation that requested that the investigation be expanded considers a “necessary collaborator” of at least one of the alleged frauds committed by González Amador.
The revelations about González Amador’s employment relationship with the Quirón Group, contained in the case, had already raised alarm bells regarding the possible interest of the healthcare giant in a businessman who is the partner of the head of a Government that allocates hundreds of millions every year to pay for the private management of Madrid’s public health system. The businessman signed the first contract with Quirón Prevention in 2017, four years before starting to date Ayuso, but González Amador’s billing to the health group has multiplied by four since they became a couple, as reported by elDiario.es.
Since May 2022, the Tax Agency has been investigating a businessman whose accounts did not add up. It could not be that he had multiplied his turnover as a result of the pandemic and that he paid less taxes than before. Alberto González Amador was an anonymous businessman for the Tax Agency during the 18 months that its meticulous investigation lasted. According to these discoveries from the Treasury, the Prosecutor’s Office opened proceedings against Alberto González in January 2024. The connection of the Madrid president’s partner with a successful bidder of the Administration that she directs was never a variable that was introduced in the judicial case.
Until the same morning that González Amador was waiting in a hotel near the courts for the signal from his lawyer to go and sign the agreement in which he acknowledged having committed a fraud of more than 350,000 euros to the Public Treasury. On June 24, early in the morning, the two parties appearing as the popular accusation presented a document that baffled the Prosecutor’s Office and the Lawyers’ Office, both agreeing to recover the money smuggled from the treasury and that González Amador be sentenced to a prison sentence. that did not imply his entry into prison.
The letter from PSOE and Más Madrid was a consequence of the hasty study of the more than 1,500 documents that made up the tax inspection. The lawyers for the popular prosecution had found invoices that they consider increase the severity of tax crimes. Furthermore, they made a different legal reading of the proven facts, especially of a fraud operation that for them represents an alleged crime of corruption in business. And that is where Quirón Prevention comes in, as a supposed “necessary collaborator.”
Judge María Inmaculada Iglesias Sánchez rejected the popular accusation’s request to expand the case. The horizon of a very brief trial and a compliant sentence returned to the aspirations of González Amador’s defense. But PSOE and Más Madrid appealed the judge’s decision. When everything indicated that the Madrid Court would have the last word, the next instance to resort to, it was the magistrate herself who partially rectified and agreed to continue investigating the fraud in which Quirón Prevention participated as a “necessary collaborator.” according to the assessment of the accusations.
In exchange for what?
Alberto González Amador has a main company, Maxwell Cremona, which on December 4, 2020, shortly after giving a hit of two million for intermediating the purchase of masks for a Galician company, Mape, in which the director of Quirón Fernando Camino, paid half a million euros for another company, Círculo Belleza SL, owned by León pharmacist Gloria Carrasco, Camino’s wife. Círculo Belleza, which Alberto González would rename as Masterman & Whitaker, had been created in 2008 by Gloria Carrasco, her brother and her husband, who is the director of Quirón Prevention, the subsidiary of the Quirón Group that constitutes the main source of income for González Amador.
The large amount that Alberto González paid for the company founded by his friend Camino, which had hardly any activity (it did not invoice even 30,000 euros) was once again the subject of attention by investigators when they verified that a year later, on December 15, 2021 , Quirón Prevention agreed with Maxwell – the parent company of González Amador – that Masterman would be in charge of the expansion in Latin America and the implementation of a quality seal for the private healthcare sector that the Jiménez Díaz Foundation was trying to obtain, the reference hospital of the Quirón Group in Madrid. In the documentation collected by the Tax Agency, a contract appears in which it is stipulated that Quirón Prevention will participate in the decision to award its work to one company or another.
On the same day of the agreement for expansion in Latin America and the quality seal for Jiménez Díaz, Maxwell sends an invoice to Masterman for 600,000 euros plus 126,000 VAT and thus manages to transfer the income from Quirón to that company. However, the Tax Agency has verified that Masterman has neither the material nor the human means to carry out any work. Not for Chiron or anyone else. What the Treasury concludes is that Masterman is an instrumental company. A mere screen with which González Amador tries to obtain future tax benefits to artificially reduce taxes.
That same December 16, Maxwell transmits all of Masterman’s shares to Alberto González Amador. And it does it for only 3,300 euros. Maxwell’s income thus ends up in the businessman’s pocket. But what is a tax fraud operation for the Treasury and the Prosecutor’s Office now presents signs of something more, a crime of corruption in business in which Quirón Prevention would have participated through the figure of its director, Fernando Camino.
The popular accusation has managed to open a separate piece asking whether the 500,000 euros that Alberto González paid for Círculo Belleza SL to Camino’s wife was “a consideration” for the contracts that the director of Quirón awarded to González Amador’s companies.
Or if that compensation is for the commission that launched González Amador’s business career: almost two million euros for putting two Spanish companies in contact, with the mediation of a third American, for the purchase and sale of medical supplies during a pandemic. The company that bought the masks, Mape, had Camino sitting on its board, which makes this mediation work that the Tax Agency always distrusted even more incredible. It was the amount that had to be paid to the Treasury for those two million benefits, which would lead González Amador to be accused of tax fraud for the fiscal year 2020. In total, for the fiscal years of 2020 and 2021, the Treasury estimated the fraud at 350,951 euros.
An agreement in danger
González Amador’s defense has already announced that it will file an appeal against the opening of the separate piece. The new investigation shakes the agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office and the Lawyers. Legal sources explain that assuming eight months in prison and paying half a million euros for the investigated person in exchange for acknowledging two tax crimes and one for falsification of documents means assuming a sentence without knowing what the new investigations will mean for the businessman.
The judge does not include in her order the procedures that she will order to clarify the facts. PSOE and Más Madrid request the statement of Camino in court and also of the director of large accounts of Quirón, who signs the contracts with González Amador’s companies. They also ask the judge to request from Quirón the messages from the corporate email account that González Amador had there and to explain what investigation the Risk and Compliance Committee of the healthcare giant has carried out.
The popular accusation also alludes in its appeal to the deed of home sales that González Amador has signed in recent years. In July 2022, the businessman bought an apartment in an exclusive area of Madrid where he resides with the Madrid president. elDiario.es revealed that the couple also enjoys another home, a penthouse located on the top floor that belongs to a company, Babia Capital, in the name of a hotel businessman from León and managed by Javier Luis Gómez Fidalgo, the same lawyer who represented the Ayuso couple before the Treasury.
The prosecutor Fidalgo, resident in León, is also professionally connected with Fernando Camino, the director of Quirón. The Madrid president has limited herself to not denying that she and her partner enjoy the penthouse, but has not given any explanation as to how much they pay, if at all, for it or in exchange for what they can enjoy it. The popular accusation wants Babia Capital SL, the company that owns the penthouse, to hand over its accounts to the court. These accounts reflect that the owner of the penthouse used by Ayuso and her partner bought the property in cash and received 955,000 euros from a third party whom she does not identify.
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