Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE)
On the day of this Thursday, the last of the trial, Héctor de Armas’ lawyer has also requested the acquittal of his client, for not appreciating a crime in the facts reported by the accusations and, above all, because he maintains that all the decisions in Canarian Integral Security were made by Ramírez, even when he transferred the position of sole administrator to his client in November 2011.
In defense of the also president of UD Las Palmas, the lawyer José Antonio Choclán has stated that in this procedure there is no room for a decision by the court other than to acquit him, because the “moment to defraud is non-existent”, as SIC had paid the amounts claimed by the Tax Agency and by Social Security before the trial and because the evidence provided lacks “quality”.
Héctor de Armas’ lawyer, Mónica Beamont, has requested that in the event that his client is convicted – an alternative that Choclán does not contemplate – the highly qualified mitigating mitigations of undue delay, confession and compensation for damages for the “significant effort” he made to pay the amounts claimed before the trial began.
In his allegations, Choclán has expressed his surprise at the position of the accusation exercised by Social Security for not having reduced the claim for civil liability by having produced a “reparation of the highly qualified damage”, referring to the debt required between 2009 and 2012, since the contribution differences required by the pick-up of the sectoral agreement and by the subsequent own agreement that it applied were introduced when, in his opinion, it was already “clear”. usured the instruction”.
Both defenses have maintained that the investigation of the case was unduly extended and, therefore, they understand that all the proceedings carried out subsequently are invalid, a nullity that De Armas’ defense has requested that it be applied since magistrate Salvador Alba took up the investigation for having used it for different and spurious purposes, for which he has been convicted and is serving a six-year prison sentence.
Choclán, contrary to what the four accusations that appear in the case maintain, has rejected that Ramírez actually exercised as administrator after having appointed De Armas, as the latter also maintains. “Whoever affirms it has to prove it,” warns this lawyer, who considers that this has not happened in this trial.
According to Ramírez’s lawyer, “there is no doubt” that his client “was the owner”, but there is no de facto administrator and only “the sole administrator is solely responsible if a tax or Social Security responsibility has been evaded”, despite the fact that the accusations cling to what De Armas declared at the last moment of the trial, which he has described as “untrue”.
The latter maintains that Ramírez continued to preside over meetings when he stopped being an administrator and making decisions at SIC, so that both overtime and other items that were paid as allowances at SIC were by his decision, as well as the withdrawal of the sectoral agreement in 2012 and the subsequent approval in 2013 of his own to lower the salary of his employees, suppress supplements and introduce productivity to avoid paying overtime.
Choclán, however, has stressed that the executives who have testified in the trial have said that they did not receive instructions from Ramírez and, in the SIC sale contract, which Héctor de Armas signed freely, he admits that the decisions in the firm were the exclusive power of the sole administrator and that it is he who calls for voluntary bankruptcy.
This should lead the court to exclude his client from the crimes that he was accused of as of 2011, but those that refer to the years 2009 and 2019 cannot be attributed to him either, since there is “no proof of the charge”, under the criteria of José Antonio Choclán.
This lawyer also argues that the reports of both the Treasury inspector Alejandro Miño, who was later appointed as legal aid in the investigation of the case, and the Social Security inspectors who work in the procedure, “lack quality.”
Those of Miño are “irrational, arbitrary and far from reality” and the liquidations that he practices and brings to court lack “certainty criteria”, by using an “incorrect method and not typical of a criminal process”, he added. All of this would be enough to absolve the client of him, Choclan has stressed, who has warned that in his long career he had never seen a similar case.
Ramírez’s lawyer has also highlighted the agreement that annulled the Social Security “arbitrarily” from the contributions that SIC owed from the years 2009 to 2012 for not having declared the allowances when since 2001 peaceful recognitions were reached for the same reason, and that this was due to the intervention of the Treasury inspector Alejandro Miño.
The defense of Héctor de Armas has adhered to everything stated by Choclán, except in relation to who decided in the company. He maintains, in this regard, that Miguel Ángel Ramírez made the decisions despite the appointment of his client as sole administrator.
Of the crimes that are dated between 2009 and 2012, he argues that De Armas had no participation in the company and, like Choclán, he considers that there had been an acknowledgment of debt by Social Security that was “arbitrarily violated” and that subsequent inspections exceeded the established time, thus diminishing the rights of those administered.
For Mónica Beamont, what has become clear is that her client dedicated herself to working at SIC, wanted to revive the company and left her health in it and “did not participate in the decisions that have led to this cause.”
SIC’s lawyer, for his part, has claimed to the court that the company not be considered as subsidiary civil liability, in any case. EFE