The Civil Guard and the State Tax Administration Agency have dismantled a network dedicated to the laundering of black money of Russian origin through a company that acquired an old party room in Tenerife to convert it into a luxury shopping center.
Within the framework of the so-called Isla Sorna, developed in Tenerife, four people, of Russian and Spanish nationality, have been arrested, who would have evaded their tax and fiscal obligations before the Spanish Public Treasury, inform sources from the Armed Institute.
They are attributed the crimes of money laundering, against the Public Treasury, unfair administration, false documentation and identity theft.
These people presumably used tax-accounting engineering, foreign investment companies and funds, front companies and trust offices to finance themselves with funds originating in Russia that they sent to Tenerife through tax havens and zero-tax territories, thus avoiding any fiscal and tax responsibility.
The investigation dates back to early 2018, when the Civil Guard detected that a Spanish company had previously been financing itself through private loans without raising them to public granted by citizens of Russian origin.
A few months earlier, this company had bought the land of an old nightclub located in Tenerife in order to convert it into a luxury shopping center.
The joint development of the investigation carried out by the Civil Guard and the State Tax Administration Agency revealed that said company, in order to start its reconversion project, had to resort to investment funds and foreign companies with Russian capital and dubious funds. origin.
Specifically, they resorted to financing sources through nationalized companies in Australia, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands, the latter place where one of the lending companies was linked to a fiduciary office associated with a multitude of vehicular-type front companies.
Through the use of these shell companies, they would have obtained mortgage loans for amounts greater than 23 million euros, some of them with interest of up to 25%.
In turn, the economic analysis carried out to date has been able to determine the use of a circuit for the introduction of funds in Spain, specifically in Tenerife, compatible with the phases of money laundering in accordance with the criteria established by the Commission for the Prevention of Money Laundering Capitals.
Thanks to the practice of a ‘fiscal engineering’ system, these operations were subsequently managed, with the aim of ultimately avoiding the payment of taxes to the tax administration.
In total, six searches have been carried out, four of them in the homes of those under investigation and two in commercial companies in Tenerife, in which abundant documentation of an economic nature (mainly accounting and billing), cash, as well as security devices has been seized. telephony, computers and electronics.
The Investigating Court 3 of Arona, which has acted in coordination with the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, has agreed to the preventive annotation of blocking and disposition of movable and immovable property, for a total amount of approximately 45 million euros, to guarantee possible civil and pecuniary responsibilities.
The Civil Guard, the Special Central Unit number 3, the Economic Investigation Subgroup, the Technical Area, the Citizen Security Unit, the Command, the Air Service, the Information Section of the Canary Islands, Seprona of Playa de las Américas and Citizen Security of Playa de las Américas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
And the Executive Service of the Commission for the Prevention of Money Laundering and Monetary Offenses (SEPBLAC) has also participated.
