The Supreme Court has confirmed the sentence to three years in prison for David Vargas, the ex-parish priest investigated for defrauding parishioners, for faking a wedding between two octogenarians to achieve an inheritance in Barcelona. The Criminal Chamber of the high court has handed down a sentence that fully ratifies the resolution of the Barcelona Court for a crime of document falsification against Vargas, who was rector of the parish of Sant Vicenç de Castellet (Barcelona), and the daughter of The octogenarian as a necessary cooperator imposes a year and a half in jail, for signing as a witness to the false wedding.
Both must pay 203,934 euros in compensation to the relatives to whom the inheritance corresponded, an amount that the Bishopric of Vic, to which the parish belongs, could assume as subsidiary civil liability for not having supervised the marriage file or detected the “irregularities” that it presented .
The wedding that the convicted man forged was for an octogenarian couple who had been living together for several years, until the man died in 2008, without having left a will and without direct descendants, so that the inheritance, valued at half a million euros, was to end up in the hands of two nephews.
Months after his death, his deceased common-law partner “arranged” with David Vargas to pretend that they had married in July 2008. To do this, the ex-parish priest filled out the marriage file by hand, in which he supplanted the identity of the deceased, and the woman’s daughter signed as a witness to the marriage, after which she was in charge of processing its registration in the Civil Registry of Sant Vicenç de Castellet so that the “inheritance rights” to her mother would be recognized.
The false wife was declared heir to the deceased’s assets and in turn designated her daughter as successor, after which she signed a reverse mortgage on a property with which she obtained 78,448 euros. The Supreme Court says that “it is absolutely abnormal that one of the contracting parties did not sign in the marriage file, that his signature was falsified in one of the supposedly signed documents, that one of the eyewitnesses did not sign either, and that the baptismal certificate did not appear “.
Neither, he adds, “that the marriage was not notified to the Civil Registry immediately and that it was done nine months after the celebration and that in subsequent documents, such as the death certificate or death notices, it was stated that the marital status of the deceased was the bachelor”.
Apart from this procedure, a court in Barcelona is investigating the ex-parish priest in a plot of scams against parishioners, in which the police came to find a suitcase with money and jewelry from the victims in the search of their home, which is why they tried to commit suicide by throwing himself off a bridge on the Ronda de Dalt in Barcelona.
