In 2018, the first lawsuit against the Larruy automotive company, owned by the brothers, entered the courts. Juan José, Michel and Marcelo Isuani Larruy, who specialize in the sale of high-end vehicles. Since that legal action, a series of clients joined and filed legal actions for the crime of fraud and misappropriation. On Wednesday, October 12, and after its formalization, the Fourth Guarantee Court of Santiago issued an arrest warrant against the owners of the company.
In August 2020, after a series of complaints for the same events, the Public Ministry asked the court to group the investigations against the car company located on Avenida Vitacura. During the formalization hearing this Wednesday, The Eastern Metropolitan Prosecutor’s Office managed to prove the occurrence of 21 crimes of misappropriation and 5 for fraud, all this for more than $400 million.
The complaints against the owners of Larruy are due to the complaint of clients who left their vehicles on consignment in the automotive company, which should be in charge of selling them. However, they never received the money from the sale, or only part of it. In addition to that, there are other ways of acting that the prosecutor Karin Naranjo imputed to the Larruy brothers.
During the recent formalization hearing, the defense of the accused asked to dismiss them, however, the court did not accept the request. According to the court: “There is a patrimonial damage to the victims, upon receiving the money and having required the money or vehicles and not making said compensation, the crime of misappropriation is constituted, turning a simple civil obligation into a crimefor said reason and by not acquiring absolute certainty that the facts do not constitute crimes.”
For this case, the Fourth Guarantee Court ordered 100 days of investigation. Meanwhile, the court decreed the precautionary measure of preventive detention and ordered the dispatch of an arrest warrant against the three defendants.
The first complainant -in 2018- of the Larruy automotive company, was because in 2013 a client signed a “sales order” contract for an Infiniti G37 Coupé car. According to said legal action, after having left his vehicle at said motor company, and upon returning from a trip, the client tried to contact the motor company, however, his car had been changed from branch.
“Without my authorization they moved the vehicle from one branch to another, and then completely lost track of it. Even more important was the response from Don Mauricio (a worker), who told me that he had given the vehicle to a relative of mine, supposedly a woman. It is from this day, that I have never had knowledge of the whereabouts of the vehicle”, can be read in the first complaint.
A second complaint accuses the automaker of putting together “a whole staging for the sale of a high-end vehicle, whose transfer never took place, despite having paid the price.”
But this complaint goes further, because along with that, the victim denounces that during the purchase of the Porsche he acquired, he was offered auto insurance, which he agreed to. Months later, that client was the victim of an assault and his high-end vehicle was stolen, for which he decided to collect the insurance. However, the insurer rejected his request, since, he points out, it was not registered in his name. At which point he discovered that the transfer never took place.
Once he went to the automaker to claim for not being able to recover the vehicle through insurance, one of the owners of the company charged him an additional $2,000,000 to collect the insurance claim on his behalf. Later, “The insurance company having paid compensation for the theft of the vehicle to Mr. Juan José Isuani Larruy, the latter refuses to pay the victim, stating that the money had been spent.but that he was going to pay him with checks, ”says the complaint.
In addition to these, there are a series of complaints about the same way of operating the company. This, according to other complaints, because once the client left his vehicle in the car company, so that it could sell it, it did not make the payments for the cars, or only partially.
The case against the Larruy company already has 32 plaintiffs to date. In addition to contemplating the occurrence of the crimes, the court also considered that it was a repeated act, with “numerous victims, considerable damage, in addition to acting in a group or gang.”
During the formalization hearing, the defendants’ lawyers argued that the social outbreak “caused a large drop in sales, generating a lack of liquidity, added to the fact that they have been victims of fraud crimes.” Thesis rejected by the Public Ministry, which assured that the social crisis “and the pandemic are not the triggers for this bankruptcy declaration, indicating that the events have occurred since before 2018 and cannot be pigeonholed in a simple breach of contract, requesting the rejection of what was requested by the defenses.”
Along with this, according to the record of the formalization hearing, Juan José Isuani Larruy’s lawyer argued that he “has never failed to recognize the debts of money and is in the presence of a commercial activity where all the plaintiffs have tools to demand the payment of money in civil proceedings”.
The defense of Michel and Marcelo Isuani Larruy, meanwhile, argued that the company is declared insolvent, “depriving of any act in order to exercise economic activity, having to do so in bankruptcy proceedings to collect credits.” Along with this, and along the same lines as the defense of his other brother, he assures that the defendants have not been involved in the purchase and sale of the vehicles with the plaintiffs: “his intervention is post-information on these facts, nothing shows that his represented have appropriated money”.
In addition to that, Juan José’s defense was against the precautionary measure of preventive detention, arguing that “there is a series of withdrawals, backed by reparation agreements and notarial transactions, with a total of 13 people withdrawn, which would imply a form to collaborate with the investigation, repairing the damage caused”.
The court ruled that the “reimbursement does not make the crime disappear, the legal classification assigned by the persecuting body is shared, it is in the presence of a crime of misappropriation and also a crime of fraud”.
According to the prosecution, the owners of the car company continued “acting normally, carrying out the same illicit acts in other companieshave constantly used their freedom to avoid obtaining evidence to successfully carry out the investigation, have not cooperated with the investigation, and have constantly delayed the investigation.”