The National audience will try starting this Tuesday 13 people accused of integrate a scheme that acquired diesel B – with reduced taxation due to its conditions of use – and transformed and later marketed it as general use diesel. Prosecutor’s Office charges them with crimes of membership in a criminal organization as well as up to nine crimes against the Public Treasury and requests up to 36 and a half years in prison for the main investigators.
The Prosecutor’s indictment states that the accused, “acting in common agreement and in a coordinated manner, were part of a group, forming up to nine plots, which operated through a complex business network of interconnected natural and legal persons.” , that “It had been operating since 2009 in a large part of the national territory.”
The group, called by researchers as Alvarado plot and that has defrauded the Treasury, had in the figure of the accused José Alvarado Martín one of its leaders since he directed “one of the most active cells.” Alvarado relied on six other direct collaborators and the rest of the defendants were employees.
The operative
According to the prosecutor’s brief, the Alvarado plot that defrauded the Treasury was made with diesel B thanks to the administrator of the Petrovelez company —not prosecuted— that “diverted diesel B from its own fiscal warehouse, which it in turn purchased without an invoice, to the hydrocarbon distribution establishments Garaje La Hoya and Combustibles La Hita.”
From a clandestine hydrocarbon transformation center located in Pines Bridge (Granada), the diesel was transported to the José Alvarado gas stations “for sale as automotive diesel.” In that transport Several investigators participated who were drivers for the company Carburantes Ecosol.
The person in charge of receiving and transforming diesel B diverted from Petrovelez to Pinos Puente to eliminate its traceability was Javier Alvarado Martín, brother of the ringleader.
According to the indictment, the converted fuel It was not only sold at gas stations owned by Alvarado but was distributed to other stations that were “regular customers” and who paid in cash.
The fraud
The prosecutor explains that the benefit of the fraud for the defendants was that diesel B that had borne the reduced rates “was sold as if it were diesel A that should have borne the general rates.”
«The price without taxes of both types of diesel is similar, with a difference only between their sales price based on the tax burden borne in each case. This difference is what Alvarado’s organization appropriated, that is, the difference between the purchase price of diesel B and the sale price of diesel diverted, washed and transformed into diesel A“, Explain.
He Public ministry quantifies the amounts defrauded in special taxes due to this operation between 2012 and 2014 at almost 2.3 million euros; VAT fraud raises it to almost 2 million euros; and corporate tax fraud amounting to 677,000 euros.