A court has confirmed the six-year prison sentence imposed on a former Bankia employee who defrauded more than a million and a half euros from 33 elderly people who kept their savings in the branch in the Madrid neighborhood of Aluche. The judges reject the appeal of the former bank agent and explain that all his victims were “elderly” people who trusted him because he had been carrying their investment portfolios for years and because, in the words of his own bosses, until then he seemed like a “model employee.” The bank, now absorbed by Caixabank, returned the money to those affected and led the criminal prosecution against him.
The sentences in the case, to which elDiario.es has had access, explain that the convicted man worked in a Bankia branch in Madrid and that between 2018 and 2019 he managed to get a total of 33 clients to trust him with their money to make investments that did not exist. . He perpetrated the deception, according to the judges, abusing the trust he had generated in them over the years, and also showing them a simulator of the Mapfre insurance company, thus disguising his promises that his products were much more profitable than their funds or checking accounts.
The reality is that, as proven by the judges, over a year and a half he made up to 73 transfers from his clients’ accounts to accounts linked to him, his family or his companies. Transfers from the accounts of 33 clients ranging from 1,287 euros stolen from a man to more than 152,000 that he defrauded from a couple. When one of the scammers began to ask questions about his benefits, the defendant deposited a small amount through an ATM so as not to raise suspicions.
The alarms, as revealed in the trial, went off at the Bankia branch in the Madrid neighborhood of Aluche in the middle of summer 2019, when the accused was on vacation. One of his deceived clients, who was defrauded of the most money, went to the bank asking for explanations as to why his profits had not been deposited. The workers, after contacting the branch director, discovered the accused’s illegal operation: the money left their clients’ accounts and reached accounts linked to the employee.
Bankia fired and reported the fraudster, returned the 1.5 million euros to the 33 affected and subsequently filed charges against him once he was absorbed by Caixabank. As elDiario.es has learned, the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid has just confirmed the sentence imposed on him in the first instance by the Provincial Court: six years in prison for a continued crime of fraud, the obligation to pay the bank the million and means that he defrauded and also pay a fine of 3,600 euros.
The judges acquitted the second defendant in the case: the convicted man’s mother-in-law. The woman, as confirmed by the Provincial Court during the trial, was listed as the legal representative of one of the companies that received the money from her son-in-law’s victims, but there is no evidence that she knew what was happening with that money and its illegal origin. As she explained to the magistrates, she did it to do him “a favor” but without knowing that behind that fortune there were 33 elderly victims.
The “predatory acts” of the Bankia agent
The two rulings in the case explain that the defendant took advantage of the “trust” that his clients had in him, and that they were people of “advanced age,” to get them to believe that he was investing their money in complex and beneficial products from the insurance company Mapfre. The branch director, whose testimony served to support the accusation against him, went so far as to describe him as a “model employee” who hid his fraudulent operations behind small transactions that did not attract attention in the day-to-day operations of a bank like Bankia.
In his appeal before the Superior Court of Justice, the convicted man denied having defrauded those 33 people and went so far as to blame the bank and the complaint for the failure of those supposed investments. According to his version, he had embarked his victims on a “society of participation accounts”, a strategy that the judges rejected: the companies and accounts to which he took the money were “opaque entities” to avoid being discovered.
The investment that he claims to have endorsed to these clients is also for investors with a “business investor profile, interested in assuming the risk of developing a commercial activity, the purpose of which is always uncertain.” A profile that “does not fit” that of the victims in this case, who are “elderly people, with little dedication to monitoring the application of their funds.”
The accused carried out, according to the judges, a series of “predatory acts” that he was able to hide until one of the affected clients went to the bank to ask for explanations and was assisted by another employee. Until then, he had made small income to “not be discovered.” His sentence of six years in prison has been appealed to the Supreme Court.
Sources from the bank explain to elDiario.es that Bankia “always followed a principle of protection and prevention of the risk of its clients” and that this case came to the hands of the courts “thanks to its control systems”, leading the accusation against the fraudster. . The result, these same sources understand, has been “optimal” both due to the conviction and the obligation to compensate the entity with 1.5 million.
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