Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) Canaria, for which the Economic Affairs Prosecutor requests that he be sentenced to 21 and a half years in prison and a fine of 105 million.
The public prosecution requests, in turn, 14 years in prison and a fine of 79.32 million for Héctor de Armas, the person who replaced Ramírez as the sole administrator of the private security firm in 2011, in a move that the public prosecutor case, create a simulation, because, from your point of view, the former continued to “continue to make all the decisions” as the owner of 91% of the company.
For almost three weeks, the first section of the Provincial Court will examine one of the most publicized cases in recent years in the Canary Islands, not only because it affects the owner of a First Division club (Ramírez chairs UD Las Palmas, of which he is majority shareholder) and a firm that for years won concessions in administrations in half of Spain for its unbeatable prices (the “king of low cost security”, the businessman from Gran Canaria was called), but also for its political/judicial derivatives.
From this case arose the attempt of Judge Salvador Alba to end the career of his first instructor, Victoria Rosell, who was even charged before the Supreme Court, until Miguel Ángel Ramírez himself turned the case around by delivering a recording to Justice in which Alba offered him procedural benefits in exchange for collaborating to charge various crimes to the then deputy of Podemos.
Rosell was exonerated of all the accusations that were raised against her, while Salvador Alba lost his status as a judge and has been serving a sentence of six and a half years in prison since October 18, 2022 for prevarication, bribery and document falsification.
In the trial that begins next week, the Prosecutor’s Office, the Social Security, the Treasury and the USO union will try to demonstrate that Ramírez and De Armas systematically resorted to a series of “fictions” in the payment of payrolls to their employees that were articulated with the excuse of overcoming the economic crisis of 2008.
The four accusations in the case maintain that, in reality, these maneuvers by Seguridad Integral Canaria sought to evade payments to the Treasury and Social Security and multiply their benefits, even if this was at the cost of “perpetuating the precarious situation of most of their workers ”.
eight crimes
The Public Prosecutor charges Ramírez with five crimes against the Public Treasury and three against Social Security, while De Armas is charged with three crimes against the Public Treasury and two against Social Security.
The Prosecutor’s Office examines in its qualification the operations that Seguridad Integral Canaria carried out from 2011 to reduce its salary mass (the bulk of the expenses in its business), which allowed it to win numerous public surveillance tenders throughout Spain, to which that came with much lower costs than those of its competition, which did pay the sectoral agreement.
The first of these maneuvers, he details, was to “camouflage” the overtime that his guards did and pay them as if they were per diems, “for an obvious reason,” stresses the prosecutor in the case: with the per diems he did not have to withhold amounts from his employees facing personal income tax and saving contributions for those payments to Social Security.
In this way, he adds, Ramírez evaded the payment of 6.60 million euros to the Treasury and another 11.45 million to Social Security.
The rest of the amounts allegedly defrauded by both defendants from the public treasury come from the company agreements that Seguridad Integral applied to its staff after “removing” from the national agreement of the private security sector.
The two company agreements were annulled by the Supreme Court, in rulings that established that Seguridad Integral Canaria should have paid its workers in accordance with the sector agreement since March 1, 2012.
By not applying the sector agreement, underlines the Prosecutor’s Office, Seguridad Integral Canaria kept its workers in a “precarious situation” that allowed them not to pay certain concepts that actually corresponded to them and for which they did not pay taxes either. EFE