Five years in prison for a lawyer who defrauded clients of 148,000 euros who ended up asking for alms

He Supreme Court confirmed the five-year prison sentence for a lawyer from Gijon who withheld 148,850 euros from a married couple of clients, which he left in such an economic situation that one of the spouses ended up in begging.

The case dates back to July 2009, when one of the couple’s members (the husband) suffered a cardiorespiratory arrest during work. Although medical care managed to save his life, the consequences remained in the form of aphasia and hemiplegia, which caused him severe disability. The medical staff, considering the seriousness of the illness, advised his wife to leave it to a lawyer to manage the collection permanent disability pension and insurance.

Almost a year later, devastated by the situation, the woman went to the office of a lawyer she knew because she was a client of the store run by the lawyer’s mother. After securing the couple’s insurance money (€85,000) and permanent disability benefits in the highest degree of severe disability (€2,847 per month), the couple moved to Valladolid, he entering a residence and she living in a rental apartment nearby. The lawyer used this transfer to advise the woman to give him power of attorney to proceed with the pending claims. The woman, who is explained in the verdict as a person of low intellectual level, approved him and another lawyer from his office a very broad authority that included the ability to deposit or withdraw funds or make transfers for payments to third parties in banks where she had open accounts.

The lawyer, apart from his office partner, began to “abuse” this power “exclusively for his own benefit”. Through numerous cash withdrawals that began just five days after it was seized managed to appropriate 148,850 euros from the couple’s account in eight years. It was such an excess that the marriage came out in red numbers for several months, “its owners suffered economic difficulties that led to [la mujer] ask for alms at the church doorsince on several occasions he went to get money from the bank to meet his modest needs, and he could not do so because there was no cash,” the verdict reads.

The matter was discovered when the man became interested in the woman’s situation and accompanied her to the lawyer’s office, who drew the prosecutor’s attention to the facts in June 2017. The Court of Asturias, in a judgment later ratified by the High Court of that community, convicted the lawyer as a perpetrator of a continuous criminal offense of abuse, aggravated by the abuse of trust and the economic situation in which he left his victims, on five years in prison and the same amount of disqualification, a fine of 3,960 euros and payment of 180,906 euros as compensation to the couple, plus 5,000 euros to the woman for moral damages. The Supreme Court corrects the judgment only in the amount of compensation, which it reduces from 180,906 euros to 148,850, given that the difference is in the expenses incurred by the defendant.