“Lawyer Friend of Pedro San Ginés Pays for Exclusive Madrid Property with Embezzled Funds”

Four days after having appropriated the costs of Inalsa for an amount of 642,000 euros, Ignacio Calatayud paid the charges for two floors in one of the most exclusive areas of Madrid.

The patrimonial report carried out by the Team against Organized Crime (ECO), dependent on the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard, within the proceedings followed by the Investigating Court No. 2 of Arrecife, has managed to prove that the UTE EDAM JANUBIO made a bank transfer to the company of Ignacio Calatayud, for the amount of 642,000 euros, on April 3, 2014, in order to pay Inalsa the procedural costs of a bankruptcy incident in which Calatayud intervened as a lawyer for the entity.

The aforementioned report indicates that, just four days later, on April 7, 2014, Calatayud proceeded to cancel, charged to the account that received the aforementioned transfer, the mortgage that weighed on two homes owned by Ignacio Calatayud Prats, SL., the commercial entity through which it channeled part of its billing.

The houses mentioned in the report are located on Calle Gravina, almost on the corner of Plaza de Chueca, one of the most exclusive areas of Madrid and their estimated value would exceed one million euros.

As detailed by the agents in their report, this payment corresponds to the amount of two minutes drawn by the lawyer friend of Pedro San Ginés, for legal costs owned by the Lanzarote Water Consortium and the public company Insular de Aguas de Lanzarote , SL (Inalsa).

Precisely in the appropriation of these and other judicial costs by Calatayud, lies the origin of the complaint filed by the Consortium and Inalsa, who have managed to prove irregular collections by the lawyer for some two million euros.

San Ginés hid from Inalsa and the Consortium the appropriation of more than one and a half million euros in legal costs by his friend Calatayud

In a recent resolution of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas, notified last April, said Court has confirmed that “there is no document in which Ignacio Calatayud is authorized to accept the amount of INALSA’s costs” and that the appropriation of these huge amounts of money owned by Inalsa and the Water Consortium was only known to his friend and former president of the entity, Pedro San Ginés, who hid them from INALSA and the Consortium.

In the same resolution, the Provincial Court has also confirmed that in this case it has been verified “the appropriation by Ignacio Calatayud of the costs of different proceedings without there being a designation for his intervention in them, such as the absence of an agreement on the destination of the costs since the existence of such an agreement on payment is impossible since there are neither appointments nor contracts”.

The same Chamber has also rejected the appeals of all the defendants in this case (which the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands considers one of the most serious and complex cases of political corruption in the Canary Islands) appreciating possible crimes of bribery, money laundering, prevarication and embezzlement of public funds, among others, because “the appointment of the lawyer required in each case the processing of the contracting procedure with a prior budget, acceptance of the same, credit retention and appointment of the lawyer by the competent body, which was not done in the cases that are being investigated in this procedure”, in which “there are no assumptions regarding the aforementioned incidents, nor acceptance of them, nor appointments, nor contracts”