New name in the numerous list of Latin American fortunes that land in Madrid. Specifically, in the financial district of Paseo de la Castellana, the main artery of the capital. One of the last is the son of Mexican Luis Carlos Castillo Cervantes, alias ‘The King of Dragons’, a corrupt businessman convicted in 2021 by the Texas justice system (United States) after recognizing million-dollar bribes to several governors of Mexico in exchange for contracts. of public works.
The son of this self-confessed millionaire builder and corruptor, Bruno Maximiliano Castillo, has chaired the Spanish company Gilltown Invest SL since June of this year, dedicated to “the management and administration of securities representing the equity of non-resident entities in Spanish territory.”
Controlled through a company in the tax haven of Panama, the company shares its headquarters with several firms in Spain owned by Honduran banker Guillermo Bueso, another billionaire who has opted for ultra-luxury real estate in the capital.
In the case of Castillo, his landing in Madrid comes after his father was gone in March 2021. sentenced to five years’ probation in the US after pleading guilty to a money laundering crime. The businessman initially risked a sentence of 20 years in prison. To achieve a drastic reduction in the sentence, he acknowledged part of the crimes he was accused of and provided “substantial” help to the US authorities during the investigation.
The nickname “Dragon” seems to refer to a dangerous drug trafficker or an episode of the popular series Game of Thrones. But the alias of Luis Carlos Castillo has a much more mundane origin. It alludes to the business he was known for in Mexico: There he had the country’s exclusive license to rent a popular brand of road paving equipment that scrapes and grinds old asphalt. Hence the “King of the Dragons” thing.
The businessman was arrested in November 2016 in Texas, where he had been living at full speed for more than a decade, to be tried for money laundering, bank fraud, bribery of officials, embezzlement, theft and embezzlement of public resources from the Mexican treasury.
The investigation, based on more than 30,000 documents, found “photographs of Castillo with politically exposed people,” handwritten notes in which mentions of bribery appeared or the identity of the politicians who hid behind the front men he used to launder illicit funds.
Between 2006 and 2007, Castillo charged 162 pesos per square meter of asphalt while the market price was around 85 pesos, in exchange for delivering cash bribes to Mexican politicians for years, sometimes sending canvas bags full of money. He made many deliveries in the $3 million, 2,300-square-meter mansion that was built in 2005 in the exclusive El Cimarrón area of Mission (Texas), where he moved like many other successful businessmen in northern Mexico.
There he set up a huge venue for events where, before his arrest, he held private parties with performances by well-known musicians, and showed photos with former President George W. Bush. He also held a campaign event there for the then Texas governor and then Secretary of Energy with Donald Trump, Rick Perry. Campaign finance records revealed that between 1997 and 2010, Castillo donated more than $26,000 to state and federal campaigns in the US, the majority of which went to Perry, he revealed. Texas Observer.
In those years, the Mexican bought about 10% of a small bank in south Texas, Inter National Bank of McAllen, which he used to help launder millions of dollars of dirty money from Mexico. Thus he became “the man who turned Mexican money into Texas mansions,” as he defined it. The Universal.
But they caught him. And just two months after his arrest, in January 2017, Castillo confessed to the Southern District Court of Texas that he had won public contracts at inflated prices to pave roads in Mexico in exchange for paying “tens of millions of dollars” in bribes. to four former Mexican governors: Luis Armando Reynoso Femat, Eugenio Hernández Flores, Jorge Juan Torres López and Humberto Moreira.
The bribes included trips on his private plane, a Learjet 45 that he had purchased in 2008 for $8.7 million. During the trial it emerged his friendship with Enrique Peña Nieto at the time when the former Mexican president was governor of the State of Mexico.
The businessman was sentenced to five years of probation after an agreement with the authorities to whom he gave up his plane, five million dollars, cars, motorcycles or diamonds. After his conviction, his lawyer, Ricardo Salinas, stated that what his client did, paying bribes for contracts, was standard practice in Mexico. When politicians asked him to help them move money to the United States, according to Salinas, Castillo had no choice but to accept if he wanted to maintain his opulent lifestyle.
No real estate
Three years after that sentence, his son has landed in Madrid. The company that Bruno Maximiliano Castillo has chaired since June, Gilltown Invest SL, currently does not have properties in its name, according to the information available in the Property Registry. In 2023, when it presented its first accounts, it had no assets and was still managed by professionals from the international trust services firm TMF.
When the company moved to Castellana in June, it passed into the hands of a company in Panama, Grupo Ram Capital Inc, which was registered in that tax haven on April 20, 2023. This Panamanian firm is also chaired by the son of the ‘King of the Dragons’. As treasurer of Ram Capital is Martín Alejandro Ochoa Valenzuela, in turn a director of the Spanish company Gilltown Invest SL.
This Panamanian firm was created four months after the Salvadoran media Revista Elementos in December 2022 reveal the existence of a trip on a private jet by Bruno Castillo and Martín Ochoa together with two people most trusted by the controversial and authoritarian Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele
On a flight from San Pedro Sula (Honduras), the son of the ‘King of the Dragons’ and his partner landed on December 3, 2021 at the Ilopango International airport, east of the capital of El Salvador, accompanied by the still today president of the National Assembly and former secretary and private advisor to Bukele, Ernesto Alfredo Castro Aldana, and the then mayor of San Salvador, Mario Durán.
The trip on that jet occurred shortly after the elections that gave victory to the current Honduran president, Xiomara Castro. Also traveling on board the aircraft, on behalf of a company from Utah (USA), was Mexican Roy Campos Esquerra, president of the political analysis firm Consulta Mitofsky and one of the best-known political consultants in Mexico. Campos has advised the Venezuelan opposition or the Mexican PRI. He was one of the members of the campaign team that brought Bukele to power in 2019.
“Mitofsky, with relative frequency, publishes results of opinion studies in which he presents Bukele as the best evaluated president in the world. This is then usually taken up by the media controlled by the Government and presented as news,” said Elementos magazine.
This publication had access to the information on that private flight thanks to a massive leak of documents from the Anti-Narcotics Division of the National Civil Police (PNC) of El Salvador. The magazine verified that between August and December 2021, no Salvadoran deputy participated in official missions abroad paid for with public funds. He was unable to unravel who paid for that private plane, at a cost of between $5,000 and $7,000 per hour.
When he made that trip with Salvadoran politicians, Castillo’s partner and administrator of that Spanish company, Ochoa, was linked to a construction company based in El Salvador, Proyectos y Construcciones Lief El Salvador. The magazine found no public contracts from the company there.
The Spanish firm that this Mexican manages is domiciled on the 16th floor of Castellana 77, in the Azca superblock. Since this year, this modern office building has been the Spanish headquarters of Hogan Lovells, one of the largest legal firms in the world. One of its partners, Juan Garicano (a specialist in “international tax planning”), is deputy secretary at the Spanish firm chaired by Castillo.
Gilltown Invest shares management and representatives (all linked to that Anglo-American law firm) with several companies in Spain owned by Guillermo Bueso, the richest banker in Honduras.
This businessman, who bought the toxic debt associated with the hydroelectric project for which the Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was shot dead, owns almost 10% of a small Spanish bank (EBN). This year Bueso has invested in ultra-luxury Madrid real estate with an exclusive apartment in Los Jerónimos.
The home, valued at 3.75 million, is a few meters from the super-luxury development sold in 2021 by the Dorado-Pizzorni, Venezuelans of Italian-Galician origin who now face claims from the Treasury and Social Security.
Bueso, whose financial group operates in El Salvador, has not spared praise for Bukele’s work “well done” and “his determined approach to the growth and stability of the economy.” “His handling of security has changed the lives of Salvadorans, setting a precedent that makes him a reference for other leaders in the region.”
Now several of his companies in Spain share headquarters with businessmen linked to corruption and private flights with advisors to the Salvadoran president. So far and yet so close.
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