The public prosecutor accuses 31 people of participating in money laundering of more than €1 million linked to drug trafficking in Mallorca. The organization is alleged to have diverted substantial profits from drug sales on the island to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United States through different methods over a three-year period, from 2018 to 2021. The prosecution seeks sentences totaling 155 years in prison for those charged with money laundering, twelve of whom had already been convicted in the case opened for drug trafficking, known as Operation Pólvora, with sentences that in some cases exceed six years. The trial will be held at the Palma Provincial Court in the coming months.
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The public prosecutor places seven suspects at the top of the scheme. In its indictment, it states they built a perfectly organized structure to channel the proceeds from large-scale drug trafficking into formal financial channels. The main aim was to reinvest the profits in Cuba, the home country of the leaders of the organization.
The defendants employed several methods to launder money. On one side, they carried out transfers and deposits into bank accounts of a company based in Las Palmas. This company specialized in transporting goods to Cuba and had a Panama affiliate. Through accounts held by front men, it received €209,293. The company was also used to issue invoices for fictional goods and services, a scheme that laundered a further €114,308, according to the prosecutor’s account.
The top leaders and the intermediaries who worked with them also carried out 14 transfers of drug-derived funds to people living abroad. Seven of these payments went to Cuba for €42,700, and seven more went to citizens in the United States who received €37,277.
The head of the gang, a Cuban-born citizen, created a work framework using the identities of two relatives living in the Caribbean country. He registered them as self-employed with the social security system and issued fake invoices to companies to move money to the network he had built. In this way, two associates paid him €85,933, and another paid him €108,190. He also used this method to pay his collaborators with fictitious payrolls.
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The third route for laundering money involved sending funds through Palma’s money transfer offices to people based in the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. The leaders used intermediaries who, in exchange for compensation, agreed to appear as the senders of the transfers, typically around €2,000 each. Between 2019 and 2021, the organization completed 152 transfers totaling €309,790. The prosecution maintains that this method required the complicity of the office managers, and nine people will stand trial for participating in this scheme.
The public prosecutor estimates the total laundered drug money at at least €1,080,242. In total, the case brings money-laundering charges against 31 people, seeking penalties ranging from two to six years in prison, as well as fines totaling more than €43 million.
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Operation Pólvora, carried out in several phases by the National Police between 2020 and 2021, led to the seizure of more than three kilograms of cocaine and €400,000 in cash.