In Alicante, the County Court recently handed down a verdict in a case involving a senior partner and director of a Alcoy-based company focused on selling artworks. The court sentenced him to six months in prison and imposed a fine of six euros for a portion of his actions, paired with a restitution figure of about 540 euros tied to a book authorship claim. The judgment also required him to cover one third of the legal costs. While the court did convict him on certain charges, it acquitted him of other alleged misconduct and granted a mitigation that reflected delays in the legal process. The court also cleared the seller’s daughter of the separate crime she faced.
As a result, the final punishment pronounced in this case ended up far lower than the demands put forward by prosecutors and the special prosecutor’s office, which oversees cases involving the company’s former partners. The state prosecutor had requested a sentence of four and a half years in prison, along with a factual matrix of offenses and fines totaling roughly 2,800 euros. The prosecutor had also sought a substantial civil liability exceeding 680,000 euros related to the value of artworks involved in the proceedings, and the daughter faced a separate two-year sentence tied to the same set of events. The court, however, did not impose these broader penalties and did not order liability beyond the measures already described.
During the trial, the court accepted the defendant’s position on the facts as established. The hearing, conducted in the Tenth Division of the State Court last May, featured representation for both the accused and his daughter by attorney Álvaro Fernández Fuertes. The man at the center of the case disclosed that he and three other partners had operated a company for the sale of art works. Disputes among the partners led to the exit of those who left the company, though it remained unclear whether exits occurred voluntarily or due to dismissal. The business faced significant debts, prompting the individual to move the paintings he owned into the estate of another art-focused company run by his daughter. He also used many of the works as payment to satisfy creditors, a practice described as daciones en pago in a contested context.
Numerous witnesses testified in support of this sequence of events, and the newspaper’s account of the sentence was treated as the established fact by the court. Yet, the court indicated that there was no precise record of the number or specific characteristics of the art pieces that might have been held by the company before the other partners departed. Consequently, the court concluded that there was no proven embezzlement or direct act of wrongdoing by the daughter tied to these particular pieces.
What the court did confirm was that the accused altered the company’s 2007 accounts that were presented to the Trade Registry. The sentence states that the accounts deviated from the company’s actual financial situation known to the defendant. It is noted that, at that time, the prosecutor described the accounts as a fantasy. In the end, falsification of accounts stands as the only offense for which the defendant has been convicted in this case.
Mitigation for unnecessary delay in the process
The judicial process endured fourteen years from the initial filing by the former spouses of the convicted person in July 2009. The court found that multiple delays were not attributable to the defendant. In light of this, the court deemed it appropriate to apply mitigation for the unnecessary delay and to narrow the punishment to the legally permissible minimum within the scope of the completed offense. As a result, the sentence was finally set at six months, a penalty that, in this instance, does not require imprisonment under the terms established by the court.