The name of the magistrate Ángel Aguallo Avilés, who advised one of the main defendants in the Unión case, has resurfaced in the context of another corruption case, the Urdangarín case. And, as happened in the case opened in Lanzarote, on this occasion Aguallo is once again affected by his private advisory work, despite being a lawyer for the Constitutional Court and later a magistrate of the Supreme Court.
Iñaki Urdangarín's former partner, Diego Torres, has been the one who has provided the Court with emails that would prove Aguallo's advice to the directors of the Nóos Institute, in a corporate social responsibility project for Pernod Ricard. According to various national media, these emails were sent by Aguallo "from corporate addresses of the Ministry of Justice".
Torres' lawyer (the same one who defends Dimas Martín in the Unión case) has delivered these emails along with a new batch of documents that compromise the Royal House, but also other prominent personalities, including this magistrate.
As the UCO pointed out in the Unión case (when detecting Aguallo's advisory work for Luis Lleó), the positions held by the judge, first in the Constitutional Court and later in the Supreme Court, are incompatible with this type of activity.
In Lanzarote, the evidence was annulled
In the case opened in Lanzarote, the agents also found emails between the magistrate and Luis Lleó, although this evidence ended up being invalidated, as the entry and search warrants in the businessman's offices were annulled. The reason was an alleged error in the wording of the warrant, although the judge who was investigating the case at the time reported the theft of this and other original warrants from the procedure.
Thus, although Lleó remains accused of attempting to bribe Carlos Espino to unblock the construction of the Costa Roja plot, other lines of investigation had to be closed, such as the possible commission of crimes related to tax evasion.
In one of its reports, the UCO pointed to these possible crimes and indicated that up to six people advised Lleó on tax matters. And, among them, was Ángel Aguallo, who at that time was a lawyer for the Constitutional Court. According to the agents, Aguallo was one of the "intellectual authors" of an opinion in which they recommended to Lleó the steps to follow so that one of his companies, Residencial Costa Roja, would be taxed as a patrimonial company, obtaining a much lower taxation than that carried out in the general regime of companies, despite not meeting the requirements for it. In that opinion, they proposed to Lleó the dissolution of the company Residencial Costa Roja and the entry of other people as shareholders. The latter was done with the purchase of shares by two people, although the UCO emphasizes that it could have been a fictitious operation, "carried out exclusively in a documentary manner".
In addition to pointing out the incompatibility in which Aguallo could have incurred with this advisory work, the UCO also pointed out his "possible participation in the alleged irregularities from the fiscal point of view carried out by Residencia Costa Roja", given that he was one of the "intellectual authors" of the report that recommended the steps to follow.
Regarding the payment for these services provided to Lleó, the agents pointed out that both Aguallo and another lawyer of the Constitutional Court, who also advised this businessman, tried to camouflage these payments, avoiding that they were "reflected directly in the name of the person who performs the advice". In Lanzarote, Aguallo was not even summoned, as the evidence was annulled. Now, Diego Torres' defense has requested that he testify in the trial of the Nóos case.