The district court handed down a prison term of nine years in a case that attracted international attention in 2015. That year, two individuals were arrested at the Torre de la Horadada yacht club after authorities seized 389 kilos of cocaine from a recreational boat. The defendants, a 79-year-old man and his 52-year-old son, were held in preventive detention for nearly four months following their arrest. Recently, they were granted relief that delays the execution of their sentences upon request, a decision influenced by the arguments of defense attorney Moisés Candela Sabater.
The prosecutor’s office did not object to the court’s ruling and initially sentenced both defendants to nine years in prison and a 14.5 million euro fine for the cocaine’s estimated value. However, the court accepted the defense’s request to reduce the sentence, leading to a lightened outcome. The reduction aligns with the absence of prior criminal records, cutting the punishments to two years. The court also imposed the same large fine with a two-month reserve detention, as stated in the judgment.
The events proven in court occurred on January 29, 2015, at the Pilarño district yacht club in Torre de la Horadada. A club sailor observed a docked pleasure boat that appeared suspicious and notified the club manager and local security forces, whose headquarters were nearby.
boat registration
The Civil Guard arrived at the scene and, after obtaining permission from the boat owner’s son to investigate, officers entered the vessel. In a small forward cabin, they discovered 13 bales containing a total of 390 packages of cocaine. The net weight was 389 kilos, with a purity of 70.1 percent. The value on the illicit market was assessed at 14,536,587 euros.
According to the court’s findings, the defendants loaded the cocaine onto the boat and coordinated its transportation from offshore waters to the Torre de la Horadada marina, earning approximately 130,000 euros for the operation. The two suspects played a central role in arranging this illicit shipment.
Images of the drugs were provided by the Civil Guard in 2015 and are part of the public record of the investigation. The information in the judgment references these photographs and the evidence gathered during the inquiry.
The Civil Guards also recovered two GPS navigation devices and a notebook containing coordinates and a description of those coordinates. The decision notes that the bales were retrieved from the open sea on January 27 at the coordinates listed in the notebook. The collection point lay roughly 31 nautical miles from the coast of Santa Pola. The father and son traveled to the coordinates with an unidentified third party to collect the drugs. The bundles were tied to a plastic barrel, floated with balloons and a small beacon, and were brought back to port in the early hours of January 28. The cache was discovered the following day.
The Audience Court, after reviewing the case, acknowledged that while the matter was not exceptionally complex, several issues needed careful handling, particularly the excessive delays that had stretched over more than eight years. Given that the delays were not attributable to the defendants, the court proceeded to trim the sentence by two degrees, reducing the overall punishment to reflect a more proportional outcome.