Several banks were shocked a decade ago when they discovered that an agent who had worked for them had spent years defrauding their clients. Those affected, in total, had lost millions of euros in non-existent investments and the suspect was not just anyone: it was Alfonso Bermúdez de la Puente, son of the Count of Castelo, well connected with the Madrid high society. In up to four sentences, different courts have confirmed that he defrauded almost 6.4 million from a total of 29 people, imposing sentences that exceed between all of them eight years in prison and for which the accused, now insolvent, has already gone to prison.
Bermúdez de la Puente, as revealed by his multiple sentences, began working in the banking sector as an agent in the early 2000s, when he was not yet 30 years old. With the company Capital Markers that he set up with a partner, he went on the hunt for clients with money to help them have more money. With juicy investments and with the authority conferred on him by the banks he worked with, but also taking advantage of the fact that many of those people knew him or were even family members.
It took them several years to realize what was happening. One of those affected reported that in 2012, at his mother’s funeral, he discovered a letter from the bank that communicated the situation of the woman’s accounts: she did not have “not a single cent.” The entity, initially Banco Popular, had discovered irregularities in the investments that this agent had managed for years. Not only in that entity: also in Banco de Madrid or the Bank of Finance and Investments, all of which have disappeared. Sometimes even working for several banks at the same time.
The victims have been parading through different courts and tribunals in Madrid to tell very similar stories about how they lost thousands of euros for trusting the son of the Count of Castelo. A couple related to his family who lost 200,000 euros in a false real estate investment in Germany said that, for them, he was “like a son” and that they gave him their savings, among other things, so that he could “make merit” before his bosses from the bank. An amount similar to the one he defrauded two brothers with whom he had “personal and family ties”, in that case with false investments in BBVA, Telefónica or France Telecom.
As elDiario.es has been able to verify, to date the courts have handed down at least four final convictions against him for crimes of fraud, document falsification and misappropriation. In most cases, the bank agent acknowledged the facts and accepted his sentence while the banks, for the most part, took charge of the money that was missing from the victims. His four final sentences add up to eight and a half years in prison in addition to various fines, reflecting that in total he defrauded almost 6.4 million euros from a total of 29 victims.
Bermúdez de la Puente, sources in the case explain, is currently insolvent and has long since stopped being able to pay the fines and compensation with his own assets. They also indicate that he has served in prison a couple of the sentences that the courts have imposed on him for the different cases of fraud. In contact with elDiario.es, his lawyer Jorge Isac Torrente, from DFive Legal Partners, highlights that there are also cases in which he has been acquitted by the courts. Not all the accusations raised against him in the barrage of complaints that began ten years ago, therefore, have been proven.
The last sentence was confirmed a few weeks ago by the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court. In that case, in which the bank agent admitted the facts and accepted a three-year prison sentence, the judges analyzed the oldest scam attributed to him: keeping more than 500,000 euros from a family he had known. through another worker in the sector. Through Fibanc – today Banco Mediolanum – and the now defunct Banco de Madrid, he made up to 15 transfers from that family’s accounts to his own, withdrew part of the money for a supposed “diversification of assets” that never existed and, finally , kept another part of the loot through a check.
In this case, the victims’ son explained in court that he found out about everything years later, when at his mother’s funeral he discovered a letter from a bank informing of the possible scam. In that case, as the Supreme Court has just confirmed, not only the banking agent must respond: also the banks for which he worked because, as the judges have said, they neither did anything to prevent the deception nor did they have internal mechanisms to do so. .
In this case, Banco de Madrid, mired in bankruptcy proceedings, and Mediolanum, respond as subsidiary civil liability parties. The affected person, said the Provincial Court in the sentence now confirmed by the Supreme Court, “was not aware of the outrages carried out by the accused, and of his helplessness before the banking entities, until well into the year 2012 when he lost his mother and had “You have to take charge of all your parents’ banking and property information.”
“He was like a son to us”
The most voluminous conviction against this former banking agent, who found his victims in his close circle, was finally sentenced a year ago when he admitted having defrauded 5.4 million euros from a total of 29 people over the years. year 2012, the year in which the first complaints against him arrived. “Good clients” of Banco Popular, say the judges, who gave him tens of thousands of euros for investments but which ended up in accounts linked to him or his environment.
Popular’s anti-fraud department realized the situation and refunded the money to those affected. In this case, unlike what happened with Banco de Madrid and Mediolanum, Banco Santander – which bought Popular for one euro in 2017 – has filed the accusation and has not been considered financially responsible for the deception. This case, settled with a consent, has cost him two years in prison.
One of the first sentences handed down against him was issued in 2016 by the Madrid Court and ratified a year later by an order by Manuel Marchena in the Supreme Court. A woman explained that the accused, the son of her husband’s cousin, offered her to invest 200,000 euros in a real estate development in Germany. Houses that they could later rent, but for which they had to be part of a company with a descriptive name: Inver-German.
The 200,000 euros were never allocated to a real estate investment in the center of Europe and the affected couple explained in the trial that they trusted the convicted man because for them he was “like a son” whom they had known “since he was born,” with a family relationship. “intense.” The partner with whom he set up the company through which he defrauded almost three dozen people also explained before the court that each one had their clients and that he never had any problems with his. Banco Popular, when it found out what happened, terminated the contract immediately.
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