The Supreme Court has issued a ruling regarding the acquittal of a former OHLA executive who had previously been sentenced to seven years in prison by the National Court for allegedly obtaining four million euros through irregular kickbacks. The individual, a senior leader within the company’s Algeria operations, was accused of moving funds from the construction group through a corporate network that spanned Andorra and Panama.
According to the decision, which El Periódico de España accessed through the Prensa Ibérica group, the manager had been convicted in 2022 of fraud offenses and a separate money-laundering charge tied to allegations of bribery during his tenure as the company’s managing director in that region. The case involved the claim that a 3 percent share of the project’s total value, amounting to 23.30 percent after payments, was channeled to OHL as part of a broader scheme.
Internal investigations conducted by OHLA indicate that more than four million euros were moved through several accounts located in a Caribbean tax haven over a three-year period, involving the manager’s personal control of those funds.
Although the National Court had acquitted the businessman and his wife in 2021, the following year the Appeals Chamber revived the matter. The court backed the company’s appeal and handed the businessman a five-year sentence for fraud, plus two more years for money laundering, along with a 3.5 million euro fine. The current ruling by the Supreme Court once again overturns the previous verdict, noting that the acts described did not amount to corruption in business life; therefore, the case did not meet the crime criteria at the time. The court’s January 11 decision states that proven facts do not establish fraud, and when the crime of corruption between individuals is absent, the money-laundering charge also falls away because the illicit funds would have had to originate from a prior crime.
A strategic tool
The alleged fraud and money laundering were tied to the Sonatrach Congress Center project in Oran, a project that involved Roc Assistance, a Moroccan organization that allegedly provided strategic, logistics, and support services to OHL. These services were positioned as public relations efforts in the internal narrative of the case.
Internal documents referenced by the national tribunal in 2022 describe a confidential arrangement in which roughly 4.3 million euros of the 18.3 million paid by OHL would be steered to Edmonton Overseas, a Panama-based entity owned by the manager and his spouse through an intermediary in Andorra. The prosecution contended that the manager abused his trusted position to defraud the company, leveraging his privileged status to facilitate the transfer of funds to offshore entities.