A lawsuit with the State Tax Administration Agency (AEAT) has brought to light the million-dollar tax amnesty that two members of a semi-unknown and rich family of Catalan businessmen, the Fornesas, took advantage of in 2012, which legalized with that measure more than 20 million euros until then hidden in Switzerland, Panama or Andorra.
Although far from the more than 113 million raised by the Gallardo brothers, also Catalans and owners of the Almirall laboratories or the private health group Vithas, it is one of the largest regularizations that have transcended the amnesty. It exceeds the 7.5 million of the grandchildren of the dictator Francisco Franco or the 10 million that the former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas raised.
Rodrigo Rato, recently sentenced to almost five years for fraud, money laundering and corruption between individuals, also attended this unconstitutional measure by Cristóbal Montoro. It benefited more than 30,000 taxpayers but only a little more than a hundred are known thanks to journalistic investigations and judicial proceedings.
The latest to emerge are the Fornesas, whose “systematic tax evasion” is stated in a ruling by the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) on October 2. Father and son presented the special tax declaration (DTE), the technical name for the amnesty, on November 27, 2012. The son, Albert Fornesa Rebés, regularized 8 million. And the father, Albert Fornesa Betriu, who died in 2017 at the age of 92, “almost double the value of his son’s hidden assets.”
They are both the third and fourth generations of this family of businessmen. Fornesa Rebés is “honorary president” of his customs services firm on the border of Lleida with Andorra, Customs and Services Fornesa, which celebrated its centenary on November 20, 2021 with a concert of classical and popular pieces in a Gothic church in the Seu d’Urgell. 200 guests attendedincluding several local politicians.
Owners of NaGrup, a transport company with headquarters in Andorra, headquarters in Spain and France and a fleet of more than 70 vehicles, in 1995 they created FR Servicios Logísticos, with a center in Hostalric (Girona) of 23,000 square meters and another in Gualba. (Barcelona) with 12,000 square meters, according to its website. With businesses in construction and real estate, in 2014 they bought BigMat Garro SA, a construction materials supply company in Sant Boi de Llobregat.
The extensive ruling of the Contentious Chamber of the TSJC includes how the son regularized hidden funds abroad for which he would have had to pay income tax and Wealth Tax in the following years. But in February 2013 he announced that he was moving his tax domicile to Andorra. At that time, personal income tax was not paid nor was there a double taxation agreement in force with the Spanish Treasury.
He had just taken control of the Andorran freight transport firm in which he was already a shareholder, which gave him a salary as director of 120,000 euros per year. In Spain “he ceased as administrator of a large number of entities of the very important family business group” and was replaced by one of his daughters, as confirmed by the AEAT.
In May 2014, the veteran patriarch, still alive, and to whom the Treasury attributed systematic tax fraud “for a longer period than the tax evasion that his son has subsequently carried out”, donated 12,625,883.74 euros to him, which had deposited in UBS and Goldman Sachs in Switzerland and Credit Andorra. In the inspection that they then open to the son, his advisors assure that he presented “the corresponding declaration for the Donation Tax”, without it appearing in the AEAT records.
The inspection of Fornesa Rebés, which elDiario.es tried to contact through its customs company, began in April 2018. In December 2017, a court in El Vendrell authorized Judicial Assistance to the AEAT to begin verification and investigation actions. . In another procedure, wiretapping of his tax advisor had been intercepted: there was talk of transferring funds from a securities portfolio owned by his ex-wife, from whom the businessman had been divorced for years.
After a thorough investigation, the AEAT concluded that Fornesa’s move to Andorra was a “simulated transfer to avoid taxation in Spain”, where it had its center of economic interests; that between 2013 and 2016 he continued to be a tax resident in Catalonia and that he had to pay personal income tax and wealth tax.
Despite the lack of collaboration between the businessman and the Andorran authorities, the Treasury attributed to Fornesa the ownership of assets in the name of intermediary companies domiciled in Andorra without “economic substance.” He was sanctioned for a “very serious” tax violation for using “fraudulent means” to not pay taxes.
He concluded that “to conceal the true structure of the family business group whose central operational axis is unquestionably located in Spain” and “to hide the fact that it is the owner of the funds, coming from undeclared income,” it used, after its amnesty, “interposed companies domiciled in countries without exchange of information” of which it was the real owner. They were companies with insignificant capital and almost no assets beyond their shares in Spanish companies.
Among them, one in Andorra whose formal owner was his ex-wife, whom, according to the AEAT, “he would have used as a front man to hide part of his holdings.” The explanation given by the businessman was “that he maintains a wonderful relationship of friendship with his ex-spouse that is transferred to the business field.”
The Treasury was surprised that Fornesa “abandoned the management of a business group whose real value is around 40 million”, a figure “immensely higher” than what it had in Andorra or Switzerland, “for the exercise of an activity whose volume is very minority.”
He concluded that in Andorra there was only a mere branch of his group “from which the final distribution of a part of the merchandise is carried out”; and that he continued to “exercise absolute control” in the shadows, as authorized in dozens of bank accounts that managed millions. Meanwhile, his daughter “supposedly begins to perform the functions performed by her father, but charging a quarter” and without hiring or promoting anyone to help her in that work.
The Fornesa customs company still said in 2021 that the three daughters were “called to take over the management of the group.” The one chosen as administrator, who appeared a few years ago in a video promoting an important law firm in Barcelona along with relevant personalities of the Catalan business community such as Josep María Coronas (formerly Abertis, today at Criteria) or José Luis Bonet (Freixenet), saw the rise her salary as administrator little by little up to 55,000 euros in 2016, compared to the more than 170,000 that her predecessor received.
To try to prove that he lived in Andorra, Albert Fornesa first provided a temporary address, but the Treasury verified that it was the home of one of his employees. He submitted work attendance reports from his Andorran company in 2015 and 2016 whose data, according to the AEAT, were “evidently false”: “He would be working 8 hours each of the working days of said periods” when “it has been proven that he was in somewhere else, for example, playing golf in Barcelona”, withdrawing money at an ATM in the Catalan capital or at a doctor’s office.
In those years, the businessman worked hard to “avoid all traces of his continuous stays in Spain”, paying “systematically for everything by card in Andorra and in cash in Spain.” He provided “an overwhelming amount of documents” to try to prove that he lived in the Principality for more than half of the year: refueling tickets at a gas station near the border, receipts from the blue zone, card payments in bars and restaurants, tickets for purchase of tobacco, two complaints to the local police, purchases in pharmacies…
Football, golf and gasoline
However, in those years “there are 2 activities whose performance could not be hidden: his attendance on 70 occasions at the FC Barcelona stadium”, of which he was a member, and the practice of golf. The Treasury determined that he practiced that sport “on more than 212 occasions in Spain, where he has participated in Senior Golf Championships.” In 2014, “just when he was supposedly going to live in Andorra,” he signed up for a golf club in Barcelona. He plays there “more than 50 times from September 2014 to the end of 2016.”
Regarding the numerous gasoline tickets that he presented, it was “evident” that he had not “been driving around all of Andorra until he exhausted the tank in just one or two days,” given the small size of that microstate: “Those fuel consumption puts “It is clear that he has been in Barcelona, or in Lleida or at the headquarters of other companies that he continues to direct during these years and, in any case, he was in Spain.”
The low utility costs also weighed on the house he bought in June 2013 in Andorra La Vella along with two parking spaces for one million. Meanwhile, the consumption of the home in Barcelona that he declared as his habitual residence until 2012, and which he donated with his ex-wife on Christmas Eve 2014 to his three daughters, remained stable.
One of them declared it as a habitual residence. But the Inspection determined that he actually lived in another address in Barcelona “supposedly wanting to enjoy his hobby of painting and sculpture without causing inconvenience.” The father “continued to keep the two parking spaces he had in the same building and pay the electricity, telephone and Internet consumption bills.”
After being sanctioned by the AEAT, Fornesa appealed to the Central Economic Administrative Court (TEAC), which accused him of “obvious systematic, planned, and bad faith conduct in his relations with the Tax Administration” to “adulterate the reality of his residence, documenting rooms and hiding others.” “A picture of systemic tax fraud, in obvious mockery of the general interests of the Kingdom of Spain.”
The TSJC annuls the fine appealed only for 2013 in “the assessment of concealment and fraudulent means” and rejects the rest of Fornesa’s approaches. The ruling reflects that his amnesty was processed by a firm “that had also presented declarations from other taxpayers revealing hidden assets and rights abroad.”
Several then moved to Andorra or Switzerland, the Treasury opened an inspection and in some cases “their habitual residence had never ceased to be in Spain.” If, like Fornesa, they prosecute their situation, their DTE may also surface more than twelve years later.
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