Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE).- The businessman Miguel Ángel Ramírez maintains that Seguridad Integral Canaria (SIC) would today be “one of the first companies in the country” in its sector if it had not been for the procedure for alleged fraud against the Treasury and Social Security for which he is being tried in the Court of Las Palmas and in which he defends that he has not committed any crime.
In his three-hour statement before the court, in the eighth session of the trial, Ramírez has assured that in Integral Security allowances were paid for travel and mileage due to the nature of the service provided by its guards and because this had been agreed with the works council and that, in addition, overtime was paid, because, in fact, when it was not done on some occasion, the workers claimed and entered them.
The businessman has alleged that Social Security itself, in a report, “did not conclude” that the payments made by his company as subsistence allowances camouflaged overtime, as the Prosecutor’s Office and the rest of the accusations maintain, and former employees and Social Security and Treasury inspectors have testified during the oral hearing, who, according to Ramírez, if they had done their job “properly” they could have verified that “we have not committed any crime.”
In addition, it has considered that if Social Security does not come to recognize that overtime was paid as per diems “the cause falls”, that it does not understand why SIC “did not owe money to anyone”, while other companies in the sector maintain “multi-million dollar” debts and are claimed through administrative channels.
The case has been cited by a firm to which the Treasury has prohibited public contracts due to differences in the contribution for unpaid overtime, and has stated that “companies with more administrative problems” than theirs “are not in criminal proceedings.”
Ramírez, to questions from his lawyer, has also made it clear that in Canarian Integral Security, when he was in charge, he did not work more than 80 overtime hours a year, and that later the system was changed by De Armas when he dropped the sectoral agreement.
He has stressed that he has always complied “scrupulously” with all the requests for information made by the authorities, providing the information they requested and making payments, and that he is not responsible for one of the investigating judges using that information “for another purpose” and “prostituting” it, as Salvador Alba did in the events for which he is serving six years in prison.
The required information was provided by Héctor de Armas with Alba’s threat of an entry and search warrant to the company in 24 hours, Ramírez pointed out, who specified that the information relating to the years 2008 and 2009 he himself made available to the court because in those years he was the administrator, but his “honour said he did not need it”.
In his statement, he has also argued that “he has the right not to have the procedure manipulated.” “I’ve been putting up with the fact that I don’t pay Social Security, the Treasury (…) that I don’t pay anyone,” he complained.
Likewise, he has defended the management of the other defendant, Héctor de Armas, who succeeded him as sole administrator in the summer of 2011, because it was “a success”, to the point that he managed to make Seguridad Integral Canaria the fifth in the country.
It was Héctor de Armas, according to Ramírez, who “had the brilliant idea” of taking advantage of the labor reform of the Government of Mariano Rajoy to get out of the collective agreement of the sector in Spain and provide the company with its own labor agreement with its workers and also prepared a second agreement that was activated as soon as the courts annulled the first.
The businessman has also opined that the union that denounced the alleged irregularities of Seguridad Integral Canaria, USO, “was not interested” in the fact that the company was the fifth in its sector in Spain. “That is the reality,” added Ramírez, who has invoked his right not to testify so as not to answer the questions of the prosecution exercised by the aforementioned union representation.
Miguel Ángel Ramírez has stressed that he has “never” been judicially disqualified and has recalled that the sentence imposed on him years ago for the works carried out in his house, in a sentence that was later annulled, only prohibited him from managing a company in the construction sector, an activity in which he was not engaged.
Ramírez explained that when he decided to appoint Héctor de Armas as sole administrator it was because he wanted to move away from the world of security and dedicate himself to his other companies and because he also wanted someone with a professional profile given the growth that SIC was experiencing.
Since then, he has assured that he never made decisions, since they corresponded to De Armas, who, even while on medical leave, continued to run the company through a chat that is contributed to the procedure.
To questions from his defense, he clarified that since De Armas was administrator “he had no signature on any checking account” of SIC nor the ability to make movements, that in the credit policies he signed in 2011, 2012 and 2013 he was listed as guarantor, and there cannot be emails signed by him in the account of that company, whose domain he did not use.
Regarding the money that was disposed of from the Bank of Spain’s vaults, he has indicated that he did not take it but Héctor de Armas did, and that for this reason he denounced him when he found out about them after SIC sold him in 2018, an operation in which he has denied that he coerced him, since he sold it because he had a strategic plan to save it, Ramírez stated, who indicated that the contract was drawn up by the lawyer Sergio Armario and that in he acknowledged that he had managed the company until then “without interference” on his part. EFE