by The battle, according to Isabel Díaz Ayuso, is between a Prosecutor’s Office at the service of Pedro Sánchez and a “boyfriend” who is the victim of a political “hunt.” For two months, the Madrid president and her team have tried to make the story about the alleged tax fraud of 350,000 euros by her partner revolve around those terms. That tension will return to the foreground this Monday at 10:00, when her partner, Alberto González Amador, is summoned to the Plaza de Castilla courts to testify for the first time before the judge of Court Number 19, María Inmaculada Iglesias. But before the case broke out, and the decibel level, the Treasury investigation had continued its course in a stealthy, orderly and relentless manner.
Between May 12, 2022 and January 23 of this year, Inspector M.’s team interviewed González Amador and his collaborators, reviewed their banking transactions and requested tax information from third countries. The February 2 email from González Amador’s lawyer is well known, admitting that “two crimes have certainly been committed against the Public Treasury.” But before that, the president’s partner already admitted on several occasions the facts for which he was being investigated. They caught him red-handed and there was no escape.
The case broke out on March 12, when elDiario.es revealed that the Prosecutor’s Office had denounced Ayuso’s partner. González Amador is accused of defrauding 350,951 euros in the 2020 and 2021 corporate tax returns of his company Maxwell Cremona, a consulting firm in the business quality seal sector. In addition to him, summoned at 10:00, the judge has requested that four collaborators of the alleged fraud appear, investigated for preparing 17 false invoices intended to reduce González Amador’s tax burden. On Monday the Mexican businessman Maximiliano Eduardo Niederer will testify at 12:00 and on Tuesday three residents of the Sevillian town of Arahal will testify, Agustín Carrillo Saborido (10:00), David Herrera Lobato (11:00) and José Miguel Carrillo Saborido (12:00).
When the case came to light, the PP and the Government of the Community of Madrid worked hard to defend González Amador. The president’s team leaked to the newspaper on March 13 The world, and then to other media, an alleged agreement between the Prosecutor’s Office and González Amador to avoid the trial. Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, known as MAR and Ayuso’s chief of staff, later spread this information through his social networks, and added that the prosecutor in charge of the case received “orders from above to withdraw the agreement proposal… all dirty.” .
The next day, the Madrid Provincial Prosecutor’s Office, through a brief and public note, explained that it was the other way around, that González Amador’s lawyer wrote to the Prosecutor’s Office by email on February 2, 2023, proposing an agreement and recognizing the criminal acts attributed to his client. That is, the email sent by MAR was part of a chain. This attempt at clarification by the Prosecutor’s Office has allowed Ayuso’s partner to sue for disclosure of confidential data.
With that loophole he now seeks to annul the case, but before that González Amador had no choice but to give up. Before the Prosecutor’s Office he had “fully” accepted the tax fraud, eight months in prison and paying 520,000 euros. And before the Treasury, he could not deny some clear evidence. These are the facts admitted by González Amador during the Tax Agency investigation:
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The first fictitious business
The first of the suspicious invoices is an alleged payment of 620,000 euros in 2020 to a Mexican company, MKE. That year Maxwell Cremona had multiplied his income by six thanks to the fact that he brokered a sale of masks for two million euros. This apparent expense in Mexico, so high, was very convenient because it allowed him to considerably reduce the tax burden for that extraordinary gain.
Ayuso’s partner claimed that he had paid MKE to help him find clients for health products in Mexican public administrations, but when the Treasury investigated, they discovered that this Mexican company was dedicated to an activity unrelated to medicine: it exported to United States milk, pasta and vegetables.
Shortly after beginning the investigation, González Amador presented to the Treasury his contract with MKE and the invoice for 620,000 euros, but no proof of payment. When the Treasury claimed it, on July 12, 2022, he admitted that this transaction never occurred. “Ultimately, there was no agreement or payment of the invoice,” he said, adding that he included that invoice in Maxwell’s accounting because it was supposed to be an advance for projects that were going to be carried out “in the very short term.” “The payment was not made immediately,” he explained, “since there was no closed project and a reasonable period was waited to see if these would finally materialize.”
The investigated person wanted to make it believe that in 2020 he had made an accounting error and that he intended to cancel that invoice in the fiscal year of 2022, two years later, but the Treasury did not accept it, highlighting that this cancellation occurred precisely at the time it was discovered. . “It is the taxpayer himself who recognizes the lack of reality of the services provided by the company,” highlighted the report sent to the Prosecutor’s Office, “which implicitly implies the recognition of the search and use of false or falsified invoices to reduce the taxation that “It would have corresponded to him.”
The Treasury also questioned the alleged MKE representative who signed the contract, Maximiliano Niederer. On April 24, 2023, appearing at the headquarters of the Tax Agency, Niederer admitted: “I do not know this company and I have not been and am not a representative of it.” On May 16, Niederer regretted that statement and sent a letter in which he said that he did know the company, but that due to an error his name and signature appeared on the contract.
A repeating pattern
The Treasury discovered another large suspicious expense in Maxwell’s 2021 settlement. This is an alleged payment of 922,585 euros to a company in the Ivory Coast, Gayani, dedicated to the sale and purchase of coffee and cocoa. The purpose of this payment was the opening of the health market in Ivory Coast and a commission for the sale of covid vaccines to the Ministry of Health of that African country. González Amador described to the Treasury a convoluted operation in which he also involved three other companies (the Basque DBT, the Galician Mape and the Andalusian Tec Pharma Europe).
González Amador learned on July 19, 2021 that Pharma Tec, the company that finally entered the contest (and for which it supposedly carried out the mediation in collaboration with Gayani), had lost. However, on October 10, 2021, he included Gayani’s invoice as a deductible expense in the accounts he presented the following year in his 2021 Corporate Tax settlement.
For months, the Tax Agency asked for explanations due to doubts about whether such a large payment was actually made. There is a request for clarifications between December 21, 2022 and May 8, 2023, when González Amador finally answered that he did not have any further explanations because he had already given them before.
In this case, the Agency highlighted the change in version. First, Ayuso’s partner had stated that the invoice was included on October 10, 2021 because the tender was under appeal, an assertion that the bidding company, Tec Pharma, denied. González Amador rectified his version and as he had done in the MKE case, he again stated that he had planned to annul it, also coincidentally after being discovered. “Months later it is confirmed that the operation will not finally be carried out and it is decided to cancel it in the 2022 financial year,” he alleged. The Agency concluded that it is facing a pattern of behavior that seeks to defraud. Coincidentally, the person who collaborated with him in issuing this invoice was again the Mexican Niederer.
New collaborators
Along with González Amador, the justice system is also investigating three Sevillians who are between 34 and 55 years old. The three live in Arahal, a municipality of 20,000 residents 45 minutes by car from Seville. President Ayuso’s partner received false or falsified invoices from six companies in said town for 180,395 euros. Sevillian David Herrera Lobato runs a management company in the town with 18 companies in his name. And the brothers José Miguel Carrillo, waiter, and Agustín Carrillo, baker, six others. The three are accused of the same crimes as González Amador.
Maxwell allegedly recruited these businessmen to do consulting work at Quirón Prevention, part of the Quirón group, the private healthcare giant. This involved advice in areas such as quality certificates, environmental plans, search for premises or cleaning plans and access to works. In reality, both Herrera and the Carrillo brothers lack any qualifications for these tasks. “I’m going to meet that man. What I needed. He thought that [Ayuso] “I was single,” one of them told EL PAÍS in Arahal last March. González Amador signed false invoices with these Sevillian companies to reduce their taxes, according to the Treasury.
During the investigation with the Tax Agency, González Amador himself expressly acknowledges that “there is no intermediation or work regarding these invoices that you are asking me about.” That is, according to the Treasury, they are false.
Screen society
González Amador also admitted to the Treasury that in 2021 he declared that he had done some work for Quirón Prevention with a front company, completely empty of content. This is Masterman & Whitaker, a company recently purchased by the investigated person. In reality, the services were provided by his main company, Maxwell Cremona, which did have employees, unlike this other company.
Maxwell had been contracted since 2018 to provide strategic and organizational consulting services to Quirón Prevention, but in 2021, González Amador assigned that contract to Masterman. Supposedly, González Amador did it because Maxwell lacked sufficient means, but when the Treasury carried out its investigations, on November 25, 2022, he discovered that Masterman really lacked personal and material means. “In fiscal year 2021, only its Sole Administrator Mr. Alberto González Amador provides services to the company and there are no external collaborating professionals or hired personnel,” the company responded, adding that the services were actually provided by “the Maxwell team.” In the list of the company’s material resources, Ayuso’s partner listed: a pair of laser hair removal equipment, another for body contouring, and a laptop. This statement is key for the Treasury, which sees it as an express recognition of the fraud.
Do you have information? Write to the authors to fpeinado@elpais.es and mviejo@elpais.es
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