The president of the Las Palmas Sports Union, businessman Miguel Ángel Ramírez, has been acquitted this Monday of the process that tried him for having allegedly defrauded Social Security and the Treasury of 36.66 million euros between 2009 and 2017 with his company Seguridad Integral Canary Islands, after the instruction carried out by former magistrate Salvador Alba was declared null and void. The latter is currently in prison in the Estremera prison (Madrid) for having conspired against Judge Victoria Rosell. The ruling extends to the person who succeeded him as administrator of the firm, Héctor de Armas, and includes the dissenting vote of one of the three judges who signed it, Mónica Herrera.
The former magistrate was convicted in 2019 for maneuvering against the former Podemos deputy when she was beginning her political career. Alba was the one who took over from Rosell the investigation of the case against Ramírez that the magistrate had begun in 2014. The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands first, and the Supreme Court, later, considered it proven that Alba acted in 2016 illegally to favor a complaint by the then head of the PP list, former minister José Manuel Soria, against Victoria Rosell (his electoral rival at that time). With this, the former Canarian popular leader intended to remove the Podemos deputy from politics.
On March 16 of that year, Ramírez went to the former magistrate's office, in the Las Palmas Court, where he explained to the businessman that it was in his best interest to help him demonstrate that Rosell was not an impartial judge. And that the way to prove it was by declaring that he maintained business relations with the judge's partner, the Canarian media businessman Carlos Sosa, and providing the documents to prove it. In exchange, Alba undertook to declare the proceedings null and void due to Rosell's alleged lack of impartiality or even to rule on the merits of the case in favor of Ramírez's interests. He, however, was surreptitiously recording the entire conversation, audio recordings that precipitated the downfall of the former judge.
The Court of Las Palmas considers in its ruling that this “spurious” behavior of Judge Alba invalidates the subsequent and formal declaration of the businessman: if it is not valid, it does not formally exist and, if it does not exist, Justice did not comply with its obligation to summon him. within the legally established deadlines to give him the opportunity to present his version, assisted by his lawyer. And without such a declaration, says the Chamber, the delimitation of the punishable basis is not possible, nor the subsequent accusation “and, even less, their conviction, since they would be exposed to a clear and decisive situation of defenselessness.”
The Ramírez trial is probably one of those that has received the most media attention on the islands in recent history. His investigation began ten years ago, it has been paralyzed on three occasions and five judges have participated: two were charged and one ended up convicted. The Prosecutor's Office, Social Security, the Treasury and the USO union maintained that between 2009 and 2013, the employer “resorted to a fiction consisting of disguising” the payment of per diems which in reality was the payment of overtime that SIC workers performed. . The reason for this strategy is that per diems are not included in the withholding obligation that any employer has regarding the personal income tax of its workers.
The ruling, however, concludes that this illicit practice has not been proven and that “the only thing that has been proven in this case is that the company concluded agreements with its workers that were detrimental to their rights,” but not that it stopped contributing. by them or that they were hidden from Social Security, “nor has it been possible to prove that they were a mere instrumental screen that masked another parallel reality.” Mónica Herrera's dissenting opinion, on the contrary, does maintain that there were five crimes against the public treasury between 2009 and 2013 by Miguel Ángel Ramírez (in addition to another two by De Armas), which leads her “to the conclusion of that the accused should have been convicted.”
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Ramírez was sentenced in 2011 to three years in prison for an urban crime, for which he would be pardoned in 2013 by the Government of Mariano Rajoy on the condition that he demolish the illegal works he did in his house. The disqualification that came with it, however, forced him to take a step back and allegedly carry out a “simulation”: placing Héctor de Armas Torrent as sole administrator, although decision-making continued to fall to Ramírez.
At the end of February, the Las Palmas Provincial Prosecutor's Office filed another complaint against a group of four people, including Ramírez himself. These people are linked to two commercial companies, and are accused of the crimes of embezzlement and money laundering, derived from the “large and unjustified income” obtained from the sale of medical supplies to the Government of the Canary Islands during the period of health crisis. of covid 19 between 2020 and 2021.
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