First he brought to Madrid the headquarters of his banana empire, until then based in the tax haven of the Virgin Islands. And now he has just bought a luxury apartment in the Salamanca neighborhood in the name of a company in the hands of another offshore firm.
It is the latest move by businessman Víctor Manuel Henríquez Restrepo, president of Banacol, an agri-food giant noted for its links with Colombian paramilitary groups and drug trafficking.
Since this year, Henríquez Restrepo has been listed as administrator of a newly created Spanish real estate company, Deltahub Spain SL. The company is dedicated to “carrying out all types of real estate activities, especially urban and real estate promotion, construction, rehabilitation, planning, maintenance, conservation, management and execution of works and urban projects.”
According to the Property Registry, Deltahub acquired a luxury home on May 29 in a stately building located at number 27 Villanueva Street, perpendicular to Velázquez and Serrano. The apartment, which houses the registered office of its owner, has a constructed area of 312 square meters, including common areas, according to the information available in the Cadastre.
It consists of a hall, nine bedrooms, bathroom, two toilets, kitchen, pantry, office and a closet. It has two entrances, one through the main staircase and the other through the service staircase. It also has a storage room. There is no mortgage on the property, which indicates that it was paid in cash. The homes in that building are sold for between 1.4 and 2.4 million euros, according to the idealista portal.
According to the Commercial Registry, the sole partner of Deltahub Spain SL is a company called Sacramali International Investments LTD. His name refers to a registered signature in the tax haven of Belize. A company with the same name (and domicile for notification purposes in another tax haven, Panama) appears linked to another company registered in June 2023 in Florida (USA).
The SFR real estate data portal links to that Florida firm with a real estate operation of more than a million dollars in the Miami metropolitan area.
Specifically, very close to Boca Raton, where businessman Alberto González Amador, partner of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, a great supporter of turning the capital into Spanish Miami, established a company after his fraud against the Treasury.
Along with Henríquez Restrepo, the other administrator of this Madrid real estate company is Gloria María Restrepo Vélez, with whom the first executive of Banacol appears linked to several companies in Panama, such as Seekadu International Corp or Henvel Investments.
As elDiario.es reported, a little over a year ago Invesmar Limited moved to Spain, until then based in the Virgin Islands, and which various reports have indicated in recent years as the parent company of Banacol. The sole partner of this company is a company called Invesmar International Investments, SA, whose name also refers to Belize. In this case, to an address that coincides with that of a modest van rental company and that was previously a tattoo and piercing parlor.
In 2021, this offshore company had assets of more than 300 million, income of 215 million and profits of 30.2 million, according to documentation it presented in Panama last year.
Invesmar, renamed Greenplus Investments SL after moving to Madrid, deposited its 2022 accounts in Spain last year, while it was still based in that tax haven. In them it indicated that in 2021 it had 124 million in assets and that it had no employees.
The accounts were signed by the Spanish manager Gonzalo Egas Bobo Mayor, who has held positions in dozens of companies in Spain. Among them, several acceptances of the ETVE tax regime (used by billionaires such as Ricardo Salinas, Mexico’s third fortune, to avoid taxes) and of the Domecq landowners, political family of former minister and former commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete. At Greenplus, Bobo represented Ibertax, a law firm that lent that holding company its headquarters in an apartment in the Goya neighborhood of Madrid. This law firm has advised at least one other firm accused of illegal land grabbing in Colombia, the Italian Poligrowdedicated to the cultivation and extraction of palm oil.
Neither Banacol nor its parent company, Greenland, have responded to elDiario.es’ questions.
Dark back
Banacol has a dark side due to its links with the controversial American multinational Chiquita, the complaints against some of its former directors for financing paramilitaries in the Urabá region, which produces almost 60% of Colombia’s bananas, and the long shadow of drug trafficking. .
A year ago, the Colombian magazine Maelstrom revealed that the company is in the crosshairs of the Italian authorities for several shipments of 3.4 tons of cocaine camouflaged in banana shipments for the Ndrangueta, the mafia that controls 80% of the trafficking of this substance in Europe.
The investigation, carried out within the framework of the Narcofiles project based on a leak of emails from the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office, highlighted Banacol’s strong connections with former president Álvaro Uribe or the current mayor of Medellín, the also conservative Federico ‘Fico’ Gutiérrez, whose financed campaigns.
Vorágine acknowledged that he had no evidence that the company knew that the cocaine was traveling hidden in its shipments. But he cited a European police source who regretted the “resistance on the part of the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office” for investigating a matter that advocated investigating “thoroughly.”
In 2023, Banacol was the third banana exporter in the country, with a share of 15%, according to data from the Augura employers’ association. The company took an enormous leap in 2004, becoming the first national producer after purchasing at a bargain price the more than 5,000 hectares of bananas from Chiquita Brands, inheritance of the monopoly that its predecessor, United Fruit, had in Latin America since the 1920s. Company, with a dark history of violence and coups d’état encouraged in that region.
In June of this year, Chiquita was sentenced by a judge in Florida (United States) to compensate with 38.3 million dollars eight victims of the paramilitaries as civilian responsible for the crimes committed by the AUC in the subregion of Urabá Antioquia and Magdalena Medio.
The American multinational had to leave Colombia due to its links with armed groups. In 2007 he pleaded guilty in his country to financing the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) with 1.7 million over seven years. Following an agreement with the State Department, Chiquita paid $25 million, the largest penalty imposed until then under anti-terrorist legislation in the United States, whose Supreme Court rejected in 2015 accusations of serious violations of the human rights of more than 4,000 Colombians. .
In exchange for that agreement with Chiquita to keep its plantations, Banacol signed a contract to continue selling a large part of its production, which included Invesmar Limited, then based in the Virgin Islands and now in Madrid.
In the case of Banacol, the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office accused two of its former directors, along with nine other banana businessmen, in August 2018 of the crime of conspiracy to commit a crime aggravated by their alleged responsibility in the financing of paramilitaries related to the so-called Convivir cooperatives, private surveillance groups made up of civilians, which ended up being the basis for the consolidation of the self-defense groups and promoted by Álvaro Uribe.
Among those denounced by the Prosecutor’s Office was Víctor Manuel Henríquez Velásquez, who presided over Banacol between 2000 and 2004. The Prosecutor’s Office, which has considered Banacol a mere subsidiary of Chiquita, although the company denies this, attributed in 2016 to these businessmen crimes such as conspiracy to crime aggravated by the financing, promotion and organization of illegal armed groups. Weeks before that first accusation was made in April 2016, the owner of Invesmar was incorporated in Belize.
The penalty that businessmen linked to the process could face is up to 12 years in prison. In May 2024, Maelstrom revealed that this investigation in the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office would be close to statute of limitations. “The accusation resolution became final on September 17, 2019, which allows us to maintain that the statute of limitations for the criminal action is set on September 17, 2025,” a source close to the process told that medium.
The note stated that on June 14, 2022, the Superior Court of Antioquía agreed with a petition from Víctor Manuel Henríquez Velásquez, former Banacol, requesting the annulment of an order that incorporated some evidence into the process with this notice: “You are warned the Judge that priority should be given to this case because the statute of limitations is close.”
The news was signed by journalist Nicolás Sánchez, who in October reported that he had received death threats for investigating paramilitarism in Colombia.
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