The First Section of the Las Palmas Court has decided this Tuesday to suspend the trial for the Fariones case that had once again placed Lanzarote businessman Juan Francisco Rosa, two of his children and his cousin in the dock for corporate crimes and document forgery. The Prosecutor's Office was asking for a total of four years in prison for Rosa, considering him the material author of the events, while for the rest they were requesting two years in prison, accusing them of "following his instructions".
On the other hand, the private prosecution was requesting civil liability from another of his daughters and his partner Rafael Lasso. With respect to the latter, it is of interest that a deed of sale be declared partially null.
The aforementioned case began in 2017 after a complaint filed by one of the businessman's partners in the Fariones hotel, García Bravo e Hijos SL, and investigates the alleged loans granted by the accused in favor of companies linked to himself and unrelated to the minority partner. For this reason, Judge Jerónimo Alonso demanded a bail of 57 million euros from Juan Francisco Rosa and his two children.
The Chamber has announced that it will return the actions to the Court that was in charge of instructing the case and agreed to the practice of "new diligences". All this, after admitting the arguments of the defenses, who requested that part of the actions carried out by the investigating body be annulled, since the extension of the actions was approved on September 18, 2019, in an "untimely" manner, seven days after the legal deadline expired, on September 11 of the same year.
The Court has highlighted that all the actions agreed after that date are considered "untimely" and that it will have to go back to the Investigating body to restructure the case. Similarly, it has validated the statements of the investigated parties of December 20, 2019, but has requested that only the diligences up to September 11, 2019 be counted.
Before the trial began, the defendants' defenses agreed with the arguments of Choclán, Juan Francisco Rosa's defense lawyer, and highlighted that the extension of the investigation period occurred outside the legal times and, therefore, requested the nullity of the actions that were carried out from that moment. Among them, the alleged subleases that the prosecution attributed to the Lanzarote businessman and the statement of Juan Francisco Rosa himself, as well as the incorporation of the book of minutes, the statement of the auditor and the tax declaration.
Choclán defended that continuing with the trial would incur in "a violation of rights" of the accused and that the case could be "contaminated". Thus, Rosa's lawyer acknowledged that, despite the fact that his defense was part of the investigation from the beginning, he had not denounced until now that the extension of the term was made a week after the maximum term for these diligences was met. However, the Court endorsed that he made this claim on the same day of the trial.
In its response, the Prosecutor's Office stated that the private prosecution, headed by a former partner of Juan Francisco, requested an extension of the investigation times in form, but that the judge decided to attend to an appeal from the defenses in which he demanded that it be the Public Prosecutor's Office that should request it.
“It was done to confuse the judge”, defended the Public Prosecutor's Office, who assured that the defense lawyers requested their intervention to grant the extension knowing that the documentation “takes at least 15 days to arrive and 15 days to return to Fuerteventura” and "must be transported by boat”, defended the Public Prosecutor's Office in its intervention. In addition, he assured that there was no "defenselessness" for this reason, since the accused were "active part" of the investigation. Thus, the private prosecution spoke in the same vein.
The Court ruled against the criteria of the Public Prosecutor's Office, which had highlighted that if they had appealed earlier "we would have saved ten volumes of the fifteen that there are". At the same time, he added that even if part of the investigation were withdrawn "there is factual substrate" to maintain the case and "probative material" to maintain the same defendants. In addition, he criticized the arguments of Juan Francisco Rosa's children, who during the investigation recognized that, despite being administrators of the company, "they said they did what their father told them".
