Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) , and their daughter, Nicole Mentado, for a crime of Social Security fraud.
The ruling considers it proven that Antonio Mentado and Lenita Burman stopped paying the social contributions of their workers from 2011 to 2016, while creating a corporate framework around their daughter, a young designer with no business experience who was fictitiously transferred sales and customers of its XTG and Lenita brands to avoid Social Security embargoes.
In this way, the court details, they came to generate a debt of 478,541 euros to Social Security, despite the fact that in previous years they had obtained “an important industrial benefit.”
The Court recalls in this regard that in the two years prior to beginning to not pay the contributions of its employees, 2009 and 2010, his company Burmen made endowments of 250,000 and 200,000 euros for the Reserve for Investments in the Canary Islands, the tax incentive that allows businessmen on the islands reduce the Corporate Tax base in exchange for reinvesting their profits.
During the trial, the defendants did not deny their debts with Social Security, but they tried to argue that these were generated by a series of circumstances that led to the failure of their business activity, not by an intention to defraud.
The Court ruled out this hypothesis outright: “The indications are clear,” says the ruling, “and point to a true succession of companies with the sole purpose of continuing to trade the Lenita and XTG brands, preventing the collection of Burmen’s debts, with transfer of workers from one company to another, with the intention of continuing with their economic activity, avoiding Social Security”.
The court acquitted the fourth defendant in the case, the accountant Airam del Pino MG, who was only accused by Social Security, but not by the Prosecutor’s Office, because “there is no record of any participation” on his part “in the decision-making that involved the commission of the crime”.
The Court finally grants the three convicted the benefit of an mitigation of undue delay, not because of the duration of the investigation (almost four years, a time that it does not see as “extraordinary”, given the complexity of the cause), but because of its own delay in setting the date for the trial to be held.
At the time, Lenita and XTG became two of the most sought-after Spanish swimwear brands and their managers even opened a store in London, in the Soho neighborhood.
Its parent company, Burmen, recalls the sentence, had up to 284 workers in six production centers and billed wholesale clients such as El Corte Inglés for close to half a million euros in some years. EFE