The National Court acquits Gonzalo Boye for the drug trafficking case

MadridSeven years after being charged, the National Court has acquitted Gonzalo Boye of the crimes of money laundering and document forgery. In between, there was a fourteen-month investigation against him, two years of waiting to send him to trial, two years of interlude until it was held and a four-month oral hearing. The trial was adjourned for sentencing a year and a half ago. In contrast, the court has sentenced the Galician drug trafficker Sito Miñanco to 17 years in prison for the operation to introduce almost four tons of cocaine into Europe in 2017. In a 325-page ruling, the court has exonerated Carles Puigdemont's lawyer because it could not “conclude unequivocally” that he had “any participation in the drafting” of the documents that served to camouflage and hide the illicit origin of the 890,000 euros in cash that were seized at Barajas airport in February 2017 and which were the embryo of the case. The case has ended with 24 convicted and 24 acquitted.

The accusation against Gonzalo Boye was based solely on the statement of Manuel Puentes Saavedra, a drug trafficker and alleged murderer who was also accused, but the court did not consider it valid: “We do not consider it totally truthful because there are issues he does not clarify”, argues the ruling. It cites as an example his trips to Colombia after the interception of the money at Barajas, and argues that there are “other equally plausible evidentiary elements” that support that the events occurred differently. These are the statements of five defendants and two witnesses, a notarial act from a defendant, and several expert reports. “All this prevents us from giving credibility to his statement”, it concludes. The Prosecutor's Office was requesting nine years and nine months in prison and a 3.1 million euro fine for Gonzalo Boye.

Since the day that judge María Tardón –the same one investigating the mass entry of migrants into Ceuta– indicted Gonzalo Boye, Junts has denounced that it was a persecution for being Carles Puigdemont's lawyer. The pro-independence leader attributed it to a maneuver of “lawfare full steam ahead” a week after Pablo Llarena had issued the third European arrest warrant against him: “When someone beats them at their own game and exposes them, they attack without hesitation,” he said. Two years ago, at the start of the trial, Boye received support from the top brass of Junts in San Fernando de Henares: “It is a political trial. It would not be happening if he were not Puigdemont's lawyer,” denounced the Junts spokesperson, Josep Rius.

Why has he been put on trial?

What was in the crosshairs are the private bills of exchange purchase and sale contracts that Manuel González Rubio handed over to Gonzalo Boye so that he could forward them to the Commission for the Prevention of Money Laundering and Monetary Infractions to justify the origin of the money under suspicion. Five people were transporting the money hidden in double bottoms in their hand luggage: the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office considered that they were being transported to Colombia to launder them, but the ruling does not consider it proven that they knew the money came from drug sales and that the objective was to introduce it into legal circulation.

To recover the money, Manuel González hired Gonzalo Boye. In a meeting at his office, he handed him documents to justify the origin and destination of the money. At the trial, he himself explained that Puigdemont's lawyer told him that the only way to recover part of the money was to prove that the origin was lawful, and he replied that he had all the company's documentation in Colombia. The ruling also includes what Boye declared during the trial: “He told him that he had carried out a financial transaction for the purchase and sale of bills. He did not understand it very well, but it did not matter to him because the only thing that interested him was that he brought him the documentation and nothing made him suspect that he was not telling him the truth”.

However, the National Court did sentence Manuel González Rubio to one year in prison for a crime of falsification of an official document because it was he who prepared them “knowing that nothing stated therein was true”. “He neither bought nor sold the bills of exchange. At the trial, he declared that he had never had the bills of exchange in his possession, therefore, it was not possible for him to sell something he did not have, nor for him to have bought the bills of exchange and not have them in his possession without explaining why”, the ruling summarizes. Manuel González's total sentence amounts to more than 20 years in prison following a shootout against agents of the Special Operations Group (GEO) of the Spanish police during the search of his home in Alpedrete in 2018.