The businessman Juan Francisco Rosa has changed this Monday the statement he made after being arrested in the Unión case, when he acknowledged that he signed a false employment contract with Dimas Martín so that he could obtain the third degree of penitentiary. At that time, before the judge he admitted that "Dimas' functions in his company were null", but two years later he changed his version and that is what he has maintained when declaring this Monday as accused during the trial of piece 12 of the Unión case, in which he has assured that he hired the historical leader of the PIL for "agricultural issues".
In total, Rosa signed two contracts with Dimas, in both cases coinciding with the granting of a third degree of penitentiary. The first was with Galerías Rosa as "works manager" and the second with another company of the group, as "administrative assistant in the furniture trade sector". However, Rosa now assures that in both cases, Dimas actually worked as "farm foreman" ?first he said he is "agricultural expert", but then he "corrected" it- and that he was in charge of the gardens of the Fariones hotel, the Finca de Uga and his vineyards in La Geria. "If he didn't go more it would be because he was escaping from work", he said to justify the difficulty of demonstrating that he attended to fulfill those functions and the working day for which he was hired.
However, Juan Francisco Rosa has also maintained that Dimas was "free" to organize his work as he saw fit. "There are people who do things in three hours and others need 20. If the job was good, maybe one day he wouldn't go", he defended. "He didn't have to go every day. Neither he nor any of my employees", added the businessman, who has repeated several times that he "didn't control" if Dimas complied with his supposed work.
"I wasn't controlling Dimas or anyone", he alleged, after stating that he then had more than 1,200 employees in his companies. About "who Dimas was accountable to" then, he replied that "it depends". "In the vineyards there is no one. In Fariones there is a manager", he added. "Sometimes I went to Juan Francisco Rosa's place and sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I went to take care of my goats, my chickens", said Dimas Martín for his part, who declared right after.
"No one in this country works 50 hours a week"
Although Rosa has said that he only ratified the third statement he made in this case in 2012, two years after his arrest, the truth is that even with respect to that one he has introduced changes. Then he stated that the historical leader of the PIL worked "about 6 or 7 hours a day", that "he hired him for 8 hours" a day and that "he believes that he went to work some Saturdays", but now he assures that he did not say that.
The prosecutor then asked that the statement be read. "It was a way of speaking, it would be a saying", Rosa replied then, after listening to his own testimony. "No one in this country works 50 hours a week", he has come to say, referring to his own words that Dimas also worked some Saturdays.
Now, he assures that he worked "from Monday to Sunday" but without a defined schedule and that some days he did not go. "Nor did he need to go to the farms every day", he said, after pointing out that in the farms there was no one in charge who could confirm whether Dimas really went or not to do something in the vineyards. And although the place of work that appears in the first contract was the headquarters of Galerías Rosa in Argana, he also pointed out that "he did not have to go to the office but to the different places" where he had to develop those supposed functions of "farm foreman". In addition, he has stated that he "does not know" how he traveled, when the prosecutor asked him if he used a company vehicle for it.
The contract, "for a humanitarian issue"
During the interrogation, in which Rosa has refused to answer a good part of the questions, the prosecutor has asked him why in the first contract Dimas appeared as works manager, why the second contract has as its object a position related to the furniture sector and why in neither of the two is anything said about his supposed real tasks, which according to Rosa are for "gardens" and "agricultural issues".
"When the management company makes a contract, it makes a contract with the activity that the company has. I don't take care of this. The management company does that", Rosa has replied, who has alleged that he limited himself to signing that contract but that he did not elaborate it.
However, he has acknowledged that he hired Dimas "for a humanitarian issue" and "because he needed a livelihood for his family". "Dimas has always been very close to the whole family. Especially his wife, Elena", he has specified. However, contrary to what he declared in his day, he has denied that he did it to help him get the third degree.
"Dimas was hired already with the third degree and on the street", he has defended on several occasions. It should be emphasized that what is required of inmates to obtain the third degree is a job offer, not a contract, which can hardly be signed when they are in prison. In fact, this is signed later, when this penitentiary benefit has already been granted. And it was there, just after he obtained a third degree, when both contracts were signed. However, Rosa has denied that that was the reason and has even assured that he has hired other inmates from Tahíche "for humanitarian reasons".
"I had spent 48 hours detained and was nervous"
Regarding his first statements before the UCO and before the judge, Rosa has alleged that he was "nervous". "I had spent 48 hours detained and was not in a position to testify", he has stated. To this, the prosecutor has responded clarifying that it is not true that 48 hours had passed, but 24, and that in addition just before he had been attended by a forensic doctor ?"for a cervical issue", according to Rosa- and that he confirmed "that he was in full cognitive and volitional conditions to testify.
However, Juan Francisco Rosa has refused to answer any question about that first statement. "It was the first time I came to Justice at that time and I was being accused of something I had not done", he has stated, despite the fact that by then he had already been charged in other cases.
It should be remembered that during that statement, the judge himself warned him that he was admitting an alleged crime of document forgery, and even the one who was then his lawyer in this case, Felipe Fernández Camero (who later became among those charged in the Unión case), asked his client up to two times not to talk more about the subject, but even so Rosa continued doing so to acknowledge that "Dimas' functions in his company were null", that they really did not even pay him the payroll and that "he does not want Dimas even close".
However, this Monday he has even explained how he paid that supposed payroll of "about a thousand euros", stating that "he charged in cash, like all the employees". "At that time there was no direct debit of payrolls. From laborers to bricklayers, everyone went to collect at Galerías Rosa", he has responded to questions from his lawyer.
"The businessman does not control me"
After the statement of Juan Francisco Rosa has come the turn of the last accused in this piece of the Unión case, Dimas Martín, who has been asked by his own lawyer about the contract with Rosa. Regarding his signature, he has defended that for the granting of the third degree to be proposed "it is indifferent that there is an employment contract" and that it is once granted when "they give you facilities to go out to look for work".
"Sometimes I went to Juan Francisco Rosa's place and sometimes I didn't. I went to take care of my goats, my chickens?", Dimas Martín has responded, who has not given details of where he worked exactly or what functions he performed. In this regard, in his day he declared in the Courts that he charged "in cash a payroll of about a thousand and something euros", that "he had enough freedom" and that he dedicated himself to go "through the farms and through the hotels", but he did not even know how to specify for which specific company he worked or what professional category he had.
"The businessman does not control me, the Penitentiary Institutions control me", Dimas has stated during the trial, in reference to the requirements that he had to fulfill so that that third degree of penitentiary was maintained. "Was I obliged to work the 14 hours of exit?", he has asked ironically, after remembering that with the third degree he can leave the prison from 7 in the morning and return at 10 at night.
About that alleged simulated contract was also asked in the second day of the trial another of the accused, the former councilman of the PIL Ubaldo Becerra, who at that time maintained a fluid relationship with Dimas and declared that he was not aware that he worked for Rosa and that he also did not tell him on any occasion that he could not talk or meet because he was working.
In his indictment, the Prosecutor's Office maintains that Juan Francisco Rosa incurred in a continued crime of falsification of a public document, since the contracts were not only presented by Dimas before the Penitentiary Institutions "to deceive" this organism, but also were registered in the Social Security, when giving him of high as supposed worker, and before the Institute of Employment. In total, he asks for him 2 years and 3 months of prison and a fine of 15,000 euros and maintains that with that "favor" to Dimas, Rosa intended to obtain a "privilege treatment", among other things to legalize his illegal hotels, since the PIL governed at that time in the Cabildo.
