The former mayor of Haría, Juan Ramírez, has been convicted again of another crime of fraud, for which he will have to serve two more years in prison. The sentence, issued by the Criminal Court Number 1 of Arrecife and dated June 7, considers it proven that Ramírez "deceived" a couple, selling them a home on which there was a mortgage. A year and a half after the purchase, the house was awarded to La Caja de Ahorros de Canarias.
Now, the sentence also condemns Ramírez to compensate the buyers with 72,121 euros, which was the money they paid for that property, plus legal interest. The other defendant in this case, Anja Hradetzky, will also have to be jointly liable for the payment of that sum. She was the administrator of Juan Ramírez's company, Arad Lanzarote, through which the sale was made, and she has also been sentenced to two years in prison. According to the ruling, both had "a malicious conduct dominated by deception, through abuse of trust in the contractual relationship."
With this new ruling, against which an appeal is still possible, the former mayor of Haría has now accumulated at least half a dozen convictions. Two of them are related to his time as mayor, and the rest to his private activity and, in particular, to the fraudulent sale of homes. In addition to this latest conviction, he has others for almost identical acts, for selling properties hiding that there were charges on them and, in one of the cases, that he no longer even owned them.
As for the convictions for his political management, he was convicted of document forgery in the Villa Dolores case, for which he entered prison in 2010, and that same year he was given another sentence of one year and three months in prison for a continued crime of urban planning prevarication. Although he has been out of the institutions for years, from where he left in compliance with a sentence, Ramírez was back in the news less than a year ago, when he was chosen as the town crier for the Ye festivities. His designation then raised a wide controversy, due to his judicial and penitentiary record.
They hid a mortgage signed two years earlier
The events that have led to this new conviction date back to 2002, when through his company, Ramírez sold an apartment in the La Cañada urbanization, in Puerto del Carmen. According to the sentence, he did so "knowing that there was a mortgage on the aforementioned property" - which had been signed two years earlier - and "without stating in said contract the charges that weighed on the property." Nine months after the purchase, the Caja Insular de Ahorros de Canarias filed a mortgage foreclosure lawsuit, given that Ramírez was not making the payment of the installments. However, he did not even then warn the couple to whom he had sold that house. Finally, in February 2004, the Justice awarded the house to La Caja.
During the trial, both Ramírez and Anja Hradetzky admitted that they participated in the sale and that they were present at the signing of the contract, but claimed that they did inform the buyers that there was a mortgage on the house. However, that was not what they declared during the investigation of the case, according to the sentence, which speaks of a "contradiction" in their own testimonies. In her case, in her first statement in the Courts she said that she "did not remember" if she had informed them or not. For his part, Ramírez did not even remember "if the property had charges or not", nor "if other apartments were sold under the same conditions". In the trial, however, he gave another version and assured that before the signing he "asked if the buyers had been informed of the situation of the property, which was mortgaged".
"It is illogical that if, as both defendants state, the buyers were informed that there was a mortgage on the apartment object of the sale, this circumstance was not stated in the contract itself," says Judge Deborah Fátima Ruíz in her sentence.
"They trusted" Ramírez because a cousin of his worked for him
In addition, the sentence highlights that the complainants made "firm and consistent" statements during the trial, "both maintaining a single, coherent and truthful account of events." According to that account, they "trusted" Juan Ramírez because he "came recommended" by the cousin of one of them, who worked for him. Therefore, "they did not inquire about the state of the property" nor did they go to the registry to verify that it had no charges.
"The fact that they have not previously gone to the property registry to inquire about the state of the property does not exonerate the defendants from their obligation to inform in any case of the existence of charges," the sentence underlines on this point. In addition, it adds that the "bad faith" of the defendants "extended later", when the mortgage foreclosure procedure began. And it is that although it is recorded that they did know about this procedure, because "they appeared in the proceedings and opposed the mortgage foreclosure", they did not even then inform the buyers.
In addition, the complainants explained that they could not register the apartment in their name in the Property Registry because Ramírez's company "did not want to". "I remember that the entity was required to make the purchase document public, but there was no response," explained the victim. Now, twelve years after these events, Justice has sided with him.
