The judge of the National Court José Luis Calama has agreed to the provisional dismissal of the case against the wineries and large exporters Félix Solís and García Carrión, from the Valdepeñas Protected Designation of Origin (DOP). I was investigating them in case both of them, facing each other, They marketed wines of lower quality than indicated on their labels.specifically in case they sold as reserve or grand reserve wines that had not met the standards required to have said qualification.
In his order, in which the instructor provisionally files the case against both wine giants, who have a turnover of more than 1,200 million euros a year, he explains that he does so due to the impossibility of “determining with the necessary certainty required in the criminal process whether wines of lower quality than the classification indicated on the bottle have been marketed. An impossibility that is due, as he highlights, to the “lack of administrative and supervisory control on the part of all operators in the sector (producers and certification entities) and the Public Administration”, to whom he directs a scolding. Therefore, it agrees to bring the facts to the attention of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Rural Development of Castilla-La Mancha “for the appropriate administrative purposes.”
The judge hears the request from the Prosecutor’s Office to dismiss this investigation that began in 2021 for the alleged crimes of misleading advertising, fraud and document falsification.
The case has been directed against four Valdepeñas wineries and their administrators, the aforementioned García Carrión and Félix Solís, as well as the Fernando Navarro and Fernando Castro wineries. For these last two companies and their administrators, the provisional dismissal was decreed in October 2023. That same month, it was agreed to direct the procedure against the certifying entities Sohicert SA and Liec Agroalimentaria SL as necessary cooperators.
Numerous errands
The order of the head of the Central Court of Instruction 4 emphasizes that after carrying out numerous investigative procedures (copious documentation, statements from those investigated and witnesses, among them the presidents of the wineries and experts), “it cannot be concluded that the irregularities existing in the activity deployed by each and every one of these operators in the wine sector constitute crimes of misleading advertising and fraud”.
Regarding the advertising crime, the magistrate explains that one of the elements of the criminal offense is missing, such as that the conduct carried out by those investigated “could cause serious and manifest harm to consumers”, so the facts would not be susceptible to integrating this penal figure.
Regarding the crime of fraud, it points out that the investigation procedures do not allow the existence of deception to be appreciated with sufficient solidity in order to proceed with the prosecution of those investigated. And, in this sense, he attributes this impossibility to the lack of control in the sector.
The judge affirms that the documentation of the different companies that distribute the merchandise in large stores, the administrative documentation and that provided by the investigated, as well as the statements of the investigated and witnesses, “evidence the existence of a lack of administrative and supervisory control on the part of all operators in the sector, that is, producers, certification entities, and Public Administration”. “Such relaxation, whether interested or not, in the production chain and supervision by all the operators involved in the sector, including the Public Administration itself, seems to have led to a system based on merely apparent or formal rather than real control, whose sanction must operate, where appropriate, in the administrative and/or civil spheres, therefore, as the Public Prosecutor’s Office expresses in its report.
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