Inalsa has warned of a possible crime of misappropriation in the payments received by the lawyer Ignacio Calatayud for the incidents derived from the company's bankruptcy proceedings, which he claims amounted to about 800,000 euros and that he received as legal costs, when the other party was condemned.
In this regard, Inalsa speaks of "appropriation" of these costs and points out that "it is an irregular practice since the right to receive them corresponds to the client and not to their lawyer". It even warns that "if an improper appropriation of said funds is detected, the penal code punishes this conduct with penalties that can reach up to six years in prison, given the high amount of the amounts pocketed."
In the case of Inalsa, which was in bankruptcy and therefore in suspension of payments, it explains that the procedural costs "have the legal consideration of credit in favor of the active mass", so they could not be "at the free disposal" of the then president of the Cabildo and CEO of the company, Pedro San Ginés. "They had to be used to pay part of the debt to the creditors, but the verbal agreement that San Ginés reached with his friend has so far allowed Calatayud to keep all the money, without returning any amount to the company, a circumstance that is even more serious as it involves credits in favor of a public company and, consequently, public funds," Inalsa insists.
His participation responded "to verbal orders from San Ginés"
The current managers of the company state that they consider "very serious what happened with the money from the procedural costs in favor of the company." "Firstly, because Calatayud's participation in the bankruptcy incidents responds to verbal orders from San Ginés, since there is no contracting or designation file that empowers him to represent the public company, since the contract formalized by his friend-president expressly excluded the incidents from the object of the contract," they emphasize.
"Secondly," they add, "there is also no instruction or agreement authorizing San Ginés' friend to keep all the money from the procedural costs in favor of the company, beyond the unsustainable statements of Pedro Martín Toledo, one of the three former administrators." At Calatayud's request, Toledo has indicated that there was an agreement by which "if the process was lost, it had no cost for Inalsa, if it was won with costs, the payment was assumed by the party condemned in costs." However, Inalsa insists that this "is not recorded by the company, because there is no document that proves the existence of that alleged agreement".
"In any case, the strategy devised by the two friends, San Ginés and Calatayud, allowed the lawyer to appear irregularly in the proceedings and appropriate 800,000 euros that should have been used to pay Inalsa's debts, at a time when, in addition, the company was in suspension of payments in the midst of an economic crisis," they denounce.
"He charged almost double what the bankruptcy administrators charged"
"The conditions supposedly agreed with Calatayud were so burdensome for Inalsa that they reached the extreme that the fees of the former president's lawyer friend even exceeded those of the bankruptcy administrators, whose fees, set by law, are used to determine the limit of what corresponds to the lawyer of the bankrupt for the entire processing of the bankruptcy," the company emphasizes.
In this regard, it recalls that the bankruptcy administrators intervened in all the incidents (more than 20 in total) and performed administration, economic control and legal assistance functions. "Tasks, those performed by the administrators, which are far superior to those corresponding to the lawyer of the bankrupt company. In addition, Calatayud only intervened in five incidents and joined the bankruptcy when it was already being processed with the previous work carried out by the previous lawyer, despite which he charged the entire common phase, without discounting the fees paid for the previous work," they highlight.
"Calatayud, thanks to Pedro San Ginés, not only pocketed 800,000 euros of procedural costs that corresponded to Inalsa in those incidents, but also kept the 156,000 euros from the bankruptcy phase and is now claiming another 82,000 euros for a new incident," they question from the public company.
