The Court of Instruction number 2 of Arrecife has transformed the preliminary proceedings in which the Irish citizen Gerry Hutch, known as The Monk, and nine other people are being investigated for money laundering into abbreviated proceedings.
This man was arrested on October 25 as the alleged leader of an international criminal gang and released on November 4 after requesting his release from prison to run in elections in his country.
This means that the judge sees rational indications of criminality sufficient to formalize criminal proceedings against those under investigation.
According to information provided by the Court's Communications Office, the proceedings have already been sent to the Public Prosecutor's Office for them to rule on whether to proceed with opening a trial against them and to issue a preliminary indictment.
For the moment, the Court has decided not to reveal the identities of the investigated individuals nor to disseminate the judicial order that concludes the transformation of the preliminary proceedings into an abbreviated procedure.
In recent years, Hutch had been living between Lanzarote and Dublin, and even acquired properties on the island, where he has been living intermittently since 2012.
This is not the first time Gerry Hutch has been arrested in Spain; in 2021, he was apprehended in the Malaga city of Fuengirola on an international arrest warrant, as he was wanted by his country's justice system for the murder of David Byrne in an Irish hotel. He was acquitted a year ago of the crime he was then accused of, a case in which he was being tried for murder.
A gang war in Ireland
The Hutch family has been disputing power with the Kinahan criminal organization for years, one of the most powerful in the world and to which Gerry Hutch himself once belonged. This struggle between the two clans, which Kinahan ultimately won, resulted in the deaths of more than twenty people after a young Irish mobster from the Hutch family was murdered by the pool of his housing development in Mijas (Málaga) in 2015.