Intercatia is an ancient town located in Castile that fiercely fought the invasion of the Roman legions. Intercatia is also the name that Alberto Esgueva, former senior official of Castilla y León, chose for one of his companies with which, according to Anticorruption, he collected almost 50 million euros in exchange for the installation of wind farms in the community. With that company, Esgueva has given the Tax Agency a tough battle. So much so that the Supreme Court has ended up agreeing with him and has closed the door on him having to pay around 20 million euros in taxes. And it does so because of a bureaucratic error from more than a decade ago. The Tax Agency inspected Intercatia from Valladolid, and not from Madrid, where it was formally based. That, according to two Supreme Court rulings, vitiated the entire process. Now the defense uses it to overthrow the criminal case.
In July 2011, after the first boom in renewables, the Tax Agency delegation in Valladolid opened inspections of wind companies in the community. There he detected a pattern that he considered could be a crime. He had discovered that electricity companies that wanted to invest in the community had to first form a company with local officials. The most beneficiary was Alberto Esgueva, who between 2004 and 2006 was CEO of the public company Excal, in charge of helping to internationalize companies and dependent on the Ministry of Economy, which approved the wind farms.
Once these vehicle companies had the permits for the wind farms, and without moving a brick, the local officials sold their participation to the electricity companies. These were already raising the wind turbines. This is how, according to the report that came to Anticorruption a decade ago, 110 million euros were moved. In December 2014, the treasury sent its conclusions to the Prosecutor’s Office in case it saw a crime.
And so much so that he saw it. That report opened the macro-cause of the wind plot from which, according to Anti-Corruption, Esgueva was the main beneficiary. He had formed a company for 24,000 euros and in 2009, with the wind farms already approved, Iberdrola bought his participation in the business for 47 million euros. That amount did not reflect the true value of that participation and depended, according to Anticorruption, on “the megawatts assigned to the wind farms authorized to the company.” That report opened a criminal case that is still pending trial and in which the prosecution requests prison for former counselor Tomás Villanueva (now deceased), his right-hand man Rafael Delgado, and Alberto Esgueva.
At the same time, the Treasury continued with its inspections. And he concluded that the Esgueva companies, Intercatia, San Cayetano Wind and Cronos Global, had also saved taxes in the operation. In different minutes and procedures he claimed about 20 million euros from them, according to sources familiar with the procedure. The report that unleashed everything leaves a detail that has ended up being key. He points out that the San Cayetano company “had its tax domicile on Núñez de Balboa Street in Madrid, where it was neither located nor known.”
The defense argued that it should have been inspected by the Tax Agency in Madrid and not the one in Valladolid. At first, the National Court was divided: one court considered that this was an unsolvable problem that vitiated the entire procedure and another, that the treasury had justified the extension of powers for the Valladolid delegation to inspect companies based in another community. , since the entire operation was carried out in Castilla y León.
In 2023, the Supreme Court annulled the first ruling that ruled in favor of the State Attorney’s Office. He considered that this bureaucratic error of not justifying the extension to Madrid nullified all the minutes. There were others on the way and, as was predictable, they have had the same fate.
In March he influenced that criterion and on September 23, the Supreme Court heard an appeal from the State Attorney’s Office against a ruling that ruled in favor of Intercatia. The State Attorney’s Office appealed “to the flexibility necessary to combat tax fraud and to adapt the effectiveness of the Tax Administration to the new circumstances” and alleged that this case, if extended, would harm the general interest. “This damage to the general interest would occur not only due to the qualitative and quantitative importance of the files affected but also because it would undoubtedly bring undesirable effects from the organizational point of view and the effectiveness of the actions in the fight against tax fraud.” .
Their arguments did not serve to convince the Supreme Court. “Although there is no doubt that the fiscal domicile of the taxpayer, located in Madrid, was the determining criterion of the territorial jurisdiction of the inspection body, the truth is that, in the case at hand, an agreement was adopted by “which extended the jurisdiction of the tax bodies of Castilla y León and although the motivation for the aforementioned agreement was clearly insufficient.” That is to say, since the Treasury did not sufficiently justify that the competition passed to Valladolid, it annuls everything.
Esgueva’s defense has already requested in the criminal case that these sentences annul the entire procedure because there is a basic principle of law according to which if the first piece of evidence falls, all the evidence that derives from there must follow. As the case remains undated, it is impossible to know if it will succeed.
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