Yesterday was one of the happiest days in the life of Arantxa Sánchez Vicario: in the final conclusions of the Prosecutor’s Office and the lawyer representing the Bank of Luxembourg (BDL) in the case that has put her in the dock alongside his ex, they both agreed to lower his plea from four years in prison to just two. Thus, since he has no previous record, the judge can suspend the defendant’s admission to prison according to our legal system. And they also agreed not to oppose this more than predictable suspension. Arantxa went to bed last night with the peace of mind knowing that, finally, he will not go to prison.
The same has not happened with his ex: the prosecutor and the lawyer of the BDL consider him to be the author or a necessary co-operator of the crime of embezzlement for which they have been prosecuted and have not changed their initial qualifications. In other words, Josep Santacana is in the hands of the judge’s decision, which will determine whether the crime he is accused of exists and, if so, what the penalty should be. In the economic question, Arantxa and Santacana do have a common destiny. The prosecutor and the bank are asking them for the same civil responsibility: to jointly and severally satisfy the amount of 6.6 million owed to the credit institution plus late interest from September 23, 2023.
The change in the criteria of the accusations responds to questions prior to the oral hearing, held in the criminal court number 25 of Barcelona, ??since they have taken into account the mitigating factors of recognition of the facts, collaboration with the investigation and having satisfied 1.8 millions of their debt. All this happened before the start of the hearing. This leads us to think that, over the course of this week and taking into account the different testimonies, the two prosecutions have agreed that Arantxa did not conspire a plan to decapitalize itself in order to evade its duty towards the BDL. On the contrary, it concludes that Santacana was the author or necessary collaborator of the crime in question and maintains for him the request for the initial penalty, four years in prison, pointing to him directly as the main person responsible, not the only one.
A couple of hours before these conclusions, Josep Santacana declared before the judge that Arantxa Sánchez Vicario had always intended to settle his debt with the Bank of Luxembourg – 5.2 million euros that interest on late payment raise to more than 7 – but that he had never been able to gather that amount. Not even with the sale of all his real estate assets, distributed between Spain and Andorra, since different charges, mortgages, lawyers’ fees and daily expenses were filing the result of each sale. Where is the money obtained? The last trace is the transfers operated from the company Huslia SA worth 4.2 million plus 386,000 euros from investment funds to Global Golden Enterprises, an offshore company based in Panama that the couple opened while still living to the United States. And there’s barely anything left. The great fortune of Arantxa Sánchez Vicario was lost like tears in the rain.
