The Investigative Court number 5 of Las Palmas has accepted for processing the complaint of the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office against four businessmen who allegedly defrauded the treasury of the profits obtained from the sale of health products during the pandemic to the Canarian Health Service. Among the accused are the current president and owner of the Unión Deportiva Las Palmas, Miguel Ángel Ramírez, and a former senior official of the Canarian PP, Lucas Bravo de Laguna, former mayor of the Santa Brígida municipality and former councilor of the Cabildo of Gran Canaria.
The Prosecutor’s Office relates in its complaint how the Canarian Health Service paid 15.8 million euros during the first year of the pandemic to the company Damco, based in Madrid and which until that year had no activity (it declared 1,299 euros of income in 2019 and 0 euros in 2018, but in 2020 it had a turnover of 18 million). Damco and Tanoja (both have Noel Jamal as sole administrator) collected 22.9 million euros from the Canarian Health Service for the sale of masks and other protective medical material for distribution in Canarian hospitals. Of that amount invoiced by a company in Madrid, with no experience in the sale of health products and with hardly any activity in the years prior to the award, 9.1 million ended up in the pockets of three businessmen, whom the Prosecutor’s Office considers mere intermediaries. .
Miguel Ángel Ramírez earned 9.1 million euros through his company Tabaiba (without activity in the years before the pandemic), and distributed those profits with Lucas Bravo’s company from Laguna, which received between 2020 and 2021 more than 2 .3 million euros. These profits of Bravo de Laguna y Ramírez were declared to the treasury under the RIC, a Canarian tax incentive that allows up to 90% of net profits not to be taxed, according to the Prosecutor’s Office. “They hid high income receipts that were not due to the development of an economic activity but to personal contacts of Miguel Ángel Ramírez and Lucas Bravo,” states the complaint admitted for processing by the judge, who has named the businessman president of the Sports Union as defendants. Las Palmas and the former senior official of the PP, who is now active in the United for Gran Canaria party.
Lucas Bravo de Laguna was mayor of the PP in Santa Brígida (18,510 inhabitants, the municipality with the highest income in the archipelago) and councilor of the Cabildo of Gran Canaria. He is the son of José Miguel Bravo de Laguna, former president of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, of the Island Council, former deputy in Congress and former leader of the PP in the islands and current mayor of Santa Brígida. Together with his father, he left the PP and founded the United for Gran Canaria party, with which he obtained a seat as a regional deputy in the last legislature thanks to his alliance with the Canarian Coalition. Miguel Ángel Ramírez is one of the main Canarian businessmen, and operates, fundamentally, in the security and business services business. He has been immersed in various judicial controversies. In 2010, he was sentenced to three years in prison for a territorial planning crime for which he was pardoned by the PP Government. Later, he was implicated in a tax fraud case. During the investigation, the businessman was summoned to court by Judge Salvador Alba, who had replaced the instructor, Judge Victoria Rosell, who had made the leap into politics with Podemos. Alba offered him help in his case if he collaborated with him against Rosell, Ramírez recorded this conversation without the judge’s knowledge, and thanks to that recording, the judge ended up sentenced to six years in prison for conspiring against his predecessor.
The Prosecutor’s Office points out that it does not rule out in its complaint that “along with the crimes of tax fraud listed, there could be evidence of money laundering, corruption and embezzlement.” The letter indicates that the companies owned by Ramírez and Bravo de Leguna had no experience in the sector “or training in relation to medical supplies.” But, also, these companies “lacked assets and personnel to carry out the activity supposedly carried out, in addition to having different corporate objectives than those to which they had corresponded.” The Prosecutor’s Office points out that the people who collected those 9.1 million euros from Damco “for the alleged provision of services” have not been able to prove that they did so and that “on the contrary, it is clear that they were assumed by Damco.” “The need for intervention by Ramírez and Bravo de Laguna is not apparent in any way, they did not assume any risk for the business activity that they say they have developed (…) Their companies have not assumed any risk, since in the event that the masks did not arrive or arrived defectively, Damco assumed it.”
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The Prosecutor’s Office does not clarify the system by which the Canarian Health Service awarded Damco, a supplier without activity in previous years, multimillion-dollar contracts during 2020 and 2021.
Ramírez has issued a statement in which he has insisted that he never offered health products to the Government of the Canary Islands and has stressed that the Prosecutor’s Office only denounces him for a tax crime. “I deeply regret that someone can claim that ten million euros in contracted material were not delivered to any of the companies mentioned,” states the businessman’s note. “This statement is flatly false. All the contracted material was delivered in perfect condition, an essential condition to satisfy the payments.”
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