The Guardia Civil, in the so-called “Mano Negra” operation, has dismantled an organisation dedicated to appropriating the inheritances of 22 deceased elderly people who increased their activity due to deaths resulting from the pandemic.
In total, eight people have been arrested and another three have been investigated for the crimes of criminal organisation, robbery, fraud, document falsification, misappropriation, money laundering, usurpation of civil status and illegal possession of weapons in the provinces of Alicante, Valencia and Bizkaia.
To date, a total of 22 deceased people have been identified as targets of this criminal group, these two being Spaniards, five French, one Belgian, four Swiss, one British, eight German, and one Finnish, with most of the relatives lacking the knowledge of their heirs. It is not ruled out that the number of victims will increase.
The agents in May 2021 learned that someone had removed the judicial seals from a house located in Benissa where he carried out renovations and stole various objects, including a high-end motorcycle.
In a first phase, the agents did not take long to identify two members of the criminal group who worked in a funeral home located in the Marina Alta region. In addition to stealing jewellery from the deceased not claimed by their relatives, they passed on information to rob the homes of the deceased and obtain their bank details.
After making sure that no family member claimed the body of the deceased, the leaders of the organisation began to act: two brothers residing in Bilbao, a 63-year-old woman with studies in Law and a 54-year-old man who was an insurance mediator.
The woman was a manager of 12 companies, including two real estate agencies and four agencies, and the man was the owner of an insurance brokerage.
The real estate agency, located in Denia and the Basque Country, were used to rent and sell the properties of the deceased. Through the agencies, which were in Bilbao and Cantabria, they turned the deceased into guarantors of their companies through false commercial contracts. In this way they achieved the deceased had a patrimonial responsibility and thus, they kept their assets in a very economical way.
To evade taxes, the brothers used a construction and renovation company, an insurance processing office, a mechanical workshop in Bilbao, two hotels in the provinces of Murcia and Valencia, a restaurant in Denia and two offshore companies in Ireland and Malta. They even took control of a cultural association in Bilbao to simulate donations and non-payments while the deceased were alive.
Among the members of the gang, there is also a former worker from a town hall in the Marina Alta region, who, through his knowledge, advised and made cadastral modifications to irregularly register the properties in the Property Registry.
Another detainee is a worker at a nursing home in the same region, who obtained the documentation and bank codes of his victims, transferring more than 112,000 euro from two nonagenarian residents of German and Swiss nationalities to the bank accounts of the criminal group.
The criminal group increased its criminal activity due to the increase in the number of elderly people who died from the latest pandemic, the difficulties families have in taking care of their bodies, and the lack of known heirs in other cases.
In addition, the criminal organisation had fraudulently initiated the usucapion procedure to acquire some properties with their prolonged use within the legally stipulated period. To do this, they made the payment of taxes and basic supplies and, to compensate for these losses, they rented them as vacation rentals.
Investigators confirmed the participation of this group in the illegal appropriation of 20 properties with a value of more than three million euro, four of them in the French city of Paris.
Given the risk of flight of one of the leaders, last October seven searches were carried out in different locations in the provinces of Alicante, Valencia and Bizkaia. In these searches, seven men and one woman were arrested and three other people were investigated.
Five firearms, almost 100 pieces of jewellery, 11,000 euro in cash, various computer and mobile phone devices, eight motor vehicles, a cold cryptocurrency wallet, 20 properties and 71 bank accounts that are being analysed have also been seized.
The Guardia Civil is keeping the investigation open since it does not rule out that it could increase the number of those affected.
