The National Court acquits Gonzalo Boye for the drug trafficking case

MadridSeven years after being indicted, the National Court has acquitted Gonzalo Boye of the crimes of money laundering and document forgery. In between, there has been a three-year investigation and a four-month trial, which was left for sentencing a year and a half ago. In contrast, it has sentenced the Galician drug trafficker Sito Miñanco to seventeen years in prison for the operation to bring nearly 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 preparation" of 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 that 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 accept it as valid: "We do not consider it entirely truthful because there are issues he does not clarify," the ruling argues. 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 requested 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 in full swing" 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 the support of the top leadership of Junts in San Fernando de Henares: "It is a political trial. It would not be held if he were not Puigdemont's lawyer," denounced the Junts spokesperson, Josep Rius.

Why was he 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 would submit 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 carry-on 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 that the money came from the sale of drugs and that the objective was to introduce it into legal traffic.

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 legal 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 of purchase and sale of bills. He did not understand it very well, but it did not matter to him because the only thing he was interested in was that he brought him the documentation and nothing made him suspect that he was not telling him the truth".

However, the National Court has indeed convicted Manuel González Rubio for a crime of forgery of an official document because it was he who drafted them "knowing that nothing of what was said there 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 that he sold something he did not have, nor that he had bought the bills of exchange and did not have them in his possession without explaining why", summarizes the ruling.