Josep Santacana has not drawn blood on his ex. On the contrary: in his statement before the head of the Criminal Court No. 25 of Barcelona, ??he stated that Arantxa Sánchez Vicario always had the intention of settling his debt with the Bank of Luxembourg – 5.2 million euros in late payment interest. rose to more than 7 – but he was never able to raise that amount. Not even with the sale of all her real estate assets, distributed between Spain and Andorra: the charges, debts, liens, legal fees and day-to-day expenses were limiting the result of each sale. No one hatched a plan to get around the Bank of Luxembourg, which refused to accept smaller amounts with the guarantee of the properties. Nothing is known about money in Switzerland.
Santacana, who has preferred to respond only to the prosecution and his lawyer, has explained that when Bonaventura Castellanos, his wife’s lawyer, called Switzerland to ask about his accounts, there was nothing left of the supposed figure of 12 million that there was. No more information could be obtained since only the authorized signature of Emilio Sánchez, the tennis player’s father, was there. This leads us to Arantxa’s rebellion against his family.
“In February 2009, our daughter was born and Arantxa decided that it was time to want to know more about her, because they always told her half-truths. She was going after her father and there was no way she could explain herself. Furthermore, there were illogical things: that if her brother wanted an apartment in S’Agaró, she said no, but the father mortgaged it, we went to eat and they closed the folders of papers so that we wouldn’t see them… Things against her . One day she asked to meet with Castellanos and her father and they met at the lawyer’s office. After the meeting she returned home with a manuscript and a backpack with all the deeds of the properties. Her next step was to revoke all the powers of her parents and her lawyer before a notary. It happened in November of that same 2009.
And if Bonaventura Castellanos explained yesterday the origin of the animosity that Arantxa’s ex feels towards him, today Santacana has mentioned him countless times. Without accusing him of anything illegal, he was just missing, but pointing out that he was the designer of the tennis player’s de-patrimonialization plan. Faced with pressure from the BDL to collect his debt, he explained that his former lawyer advised him to concentrate all of his properties, always in the name of companies, into one to expedite the sales of the properties and obtain liquidity. To do this, he contacted a Uruguayan law firm and from there they created Huslia S. A. He denied that it had been his idea.
Throughout the trial, one point has become clear: that the tennis player has only basic studies and was completely inexperienced in corporate law. On the other hand, asked about her CV, Santacana declared this, perhaps without realizing the implications of the last sentence: “I have studied Tourism, I have had restaurants: two in Badalona, ??another in Castelldefels and another in Barcelona. I had a chain of sports centers and I dedicated myself to construction, developing homes and then subcontracted by the Hábitat group and Núñez y Navarro to carry out promotions. Yes, I have financial knowledge.” Furthermore, Antonio Emilio Hermosilla, also accused of being an accomplice in the seizure of assets as a front man, stated in court that he received instructions from Santacana.
Where is the money obtained from the sales of that real estate asset? The answer to the big question is that it was lost like tears in the rain. “It was necessary to generate liquidity and not only to pay the BDL but because there were about 50 or 60,000 euros of fixed expenses per month. “That’s what there was when they left the properties to her.” She mentions Santacana four mortgages, other debts and liens, payments to lawyers and managers, gardeners, etc. And maintain the standard of living and day-to-day expenses. The BDL investigation detected international transfers made from Huslia accounts in Santander to accounts in the name of Global Golden Enterprises – a company created from the US but based in Panama – for a total amount of 4,190,029 euros. The investment funds in Mapfre Inversión S.V., 386,351 euros, also went there. And about all this, Santacana had to give explanations:
“It was run by a manager whom I only saw a couple of times. She went to that bank because the manager was Spanish, a tennis fan, and he knew Emilio Sánchez Vicario from a loan for his academy. Since Arantxa was not a resident of the United States, he created that company for her. Yes, in December 2014 Global Golden became my ownership but the funds were no longer transferred: they were spent over the previous years for different expenses. And two million that were left were taken out by Arantxa for a pre-purchase of a penthouse, Paraíso Bay in Miami.”
Santacana ended his speech with a beneficial testimony for his ex-wife: “The BDL wanted the money no matter what because they knew that at the time there was a guarantee of 15 million. But Arantxa never had 5.2 million in cash to pay and they did not accept a property guarantee. I never advised him to do anything to hide his wealth nor have I ever benefited from it. From the first moment, Arantxa had the intention of paying his debt.”
