The Seville Court has scheduled the trial to begin from today for the alleged embezzlement of some 2.5 million euro in the compensation board of Sector F of Almensilla, a case in which the former treasurer of the entity Julio Mateos Palacios, the former socialist councillor and former president of the compensation board Ismael Antonio Perea, the attorney of a law firm and the manager of a company have alleged involvement.
It was in the spring of 2021, when the Investigative Court number one of Coria del Río agreed to open an oral trial against the former treasurer of the compensation board of Sector F, Julio Mateos Palacios; Ismael Perea as former president of the entity; Juan Carlos Navarro as representative of the law firm in charge of legal advice to the compensation board and Manuel López Sequera as manager of a company that supplies the entity.
The court attributed two alleged continuous crimes of misappropriation to Julio Mateos and Ismael Perea as perpetrators, accusing the remaining two defendants of the same crime but as accomplices.
In mid-May 2015, Julio Mateos confessed in an email that he had appropriated money from the compensation board’s account, supplied with contributions from the landowners to undertake the development of sector F and the provision of basic services in the area, some works are still far from being complete. After confessing to this, Julio Mateos fled to the Dominican Republic, finally being arrested and imprisoned in Spain in August 2016.
According to the National Police, Julio Mateos, “taking advantage of his position (as treasurer of the Sector F compensation board), was appropriating large sums of money” since 2006. The investigators, in that sense, initially calculated that the embezzlement total could amount to more than 3,706,718 euro, “with a number of people affected that would be around 600 families”, alluding to the group of plot owners.
“PREVALIDING HIS POSITION”
In that sense, the abbreviated procedure order from Court number one of Coria detailed that “during the period of time in which Julio Mateos held the position of treasurer of the compensation board, taking advantage of his position and the trust placed in him by the parcelistas, being authorised in the accounts in which the entity was the owner and guided with the intention of enriching himself, he appropriated or diverted large sums of money through checks charged to the compensation board account, incorporating it into their own heritage”.
According to the order, Julio Mateos could have obtained 1.63 million euro through the Asema entity, an economic consultancy of which he had been the representative since 2002, “and in his own name he received an amount of 282,102 euro, being aware who did not carry out any paid work for the compensation board”, which was facing the aforementioned project to install basic facilities in the area around plots in sector F.
THE ROLE OF ISMAEL PEREA
As for Ismael Antonio Perea, former socialist councillor of Almensilla, president of the compensation board from January 2009 to December 2012 and former director of the Fernando de los Ríos Consortium, the judge noted that “taking advantage of his position and being also authorised in the accounts of the compensation board, he withdrew the amount of 301,695 euro”.
According to the investigating court in the case, the investigation revealed “a large gap between the funds withdrawn and those applied to the payment of invoices to suppliers, specifically with a total difference of 156,766 euro, an amount that Ismael Perea withdrew for illicit enrichment purposes personal, acting in common agreement with the treasurer of the entity”.
The Prosecutor’s Office finally set the amount of the alleged embezzlement at around 2.5 million, requesting in its indictment for Julio Mateos a sentence of six years in prison and a fine of twelve months with a daily fee of 20 euro, with subsidiary civil liability. For Ismael Perea, a sentence of four and a half years in prison and a fine of ten months with a daily fee of 20 euro for another continued crime of misappropriation.
Likewise, the Prosecutor’s Office also accuses Juan Carlos NH, attorney of the company Torrens Abogados SLP, the law firm in charge of legal advice to the compensation board, of a possible continuing crime of misappropriation and requests a sentence of one year less one day for him. of prison and a fine of five months with a daily fee of 20 euro.
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