The Prosecutor’s Office requests 31 years in prison for Sito Miñanco and nine for Puigdemont’s lawyer

José Ramón Prado Bugallo, alias Sito Miñanco, 66, accused of leading a money laundering network with cocaine trafficking when he was in semi-freedom, is already familiar with the new request for a sentence for “operation Myth”. The Prosecutor’s Office has claimed 31 and a half years in prison for the ‘señor do fume’ from Cambados (Pontevedra), who began in the eighties with tobacco trafficking, and nine years and nine months in prison for Gonzalo Boye, the lawyer of the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont and other pro-independence leaders for allegedly collaborating with this network.

The Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office has forwarded its provisional indictment to the Central Court of Instruction number three of the National Court, after this body concluded the investigation and proposed, with the endorsement of the Criminal Chamber, to try more than 50 defendants as alleged members of the organization led by Sito Miñanco for alleged crimes against public health and money laundering, among others.

In the letter, it has also been requested that a fine of at least 2.7 million euros be punished for Boye and more than 950 million for Sito Miñanco, whose purpose was to introduce and distribute large quantities of drugs in the country from Colombia. . For this, he had a “necessary personal infrastructure” who had already accumulated “significant criminal experience in the drug trafficking business.”

All the defendants are allegedly related to ‘operation Myth’, centered on the network that the Galician drug trafficker allegedly directed and who tried unsuccessfully to smuggle more than 4,000 kilos of cocaine in two different operations. A plan that was cut short by the investigators who had been tracking him since 2016, when he was residing halfway between Malaga and Cádiz on semi-freedom for another reason.

The Prosecutor’s Office has also requested 22 years in prison for Luis Enrique García Arango, an alleged partner in the illegal businesses of Sito Miñanco, and Juan Antonio Fernández, to whom he also entrusted the “details of the different criminal operations.”

The “fictitious” promissory notes

In 179 pages, the Public Ministry has described that between 2016 and 2018 the main activity of Sito Miñanco continued to be the introduction and distribution of narcotic substances in Spain, despite the fact that he was serving a sentence in the Algeciras Penitentiary Center.

Within the framework of this alleged organization, Boye, who is on provisional release, was prosecuted for one crime of money laundering and another of document falsification for his alleged participation in the operation to recover 889,620 euros that the Police had seized from members of organization at the Madrid-Barajas airport.

These “human couriers”, who were carrying the money hidden in a suitcase to move it to Colombia, were arrested in February 2017. Then, according to the account of the investigating magistrate María Tardón, the leaders contacted Boye and another lawyer, Jesús Morán, so that they prepare some documents that justify the legal origin of the money: some promissory notes with loan contracts that are suspected to be “false”, since the Treasury warned them that they had already been previously justified and that they were not valid for claims.

For the Public Ministry, “the alleged business did not present any commercial logic” and Boye “presented said sales contracts in the administrative file knowing that they were false and that the operations reflected were fictitious, in order to recover the seized money and hide that it came from drug trafficking. Boye’s investigation began after the voluntary declaration of a defendant of Colombian origin, MAPS, who placed Sito Miñanco, his Colombian lieutenant García Arango, and himself in the office of the Chilean-born lawyer.

The police device that uncovered ‘operation Myth’ in February 2018 made arrests in Algeciras (Cádiz), Seville, Marbella (Málaga), Linares (Jaén), Madrid, Barcelona and Galicia, and resulted in 47 records in ships, farms and homes. The cause is also directed against the wife of Sito Miñanco, the capo Ramiro Somoza or David Pérez Lago, stepson of the historic Galician capo Laureano Oubiña. In that operation, three agents, two of them from the Special Operations Group (GEO), were injured when they entered a warehouse belonging to a shooting club in Alpedrete (Madrid).

Miñanco, who has spent more than 20 years in prison for two sentences from the National Court, had been on semi-liberty since April 2015 and was working as a security officer for a parking company in Algeciras when he was arrested, owned by his lawyer from always, José María Barrena.