They were supposed to take care of them, but they dedicated themselves to plundering their money. One of the victims was named Vicente and spent his life dedicated to the priesthood. When he entered, with dementia, a residence for religious members of the Dominican order, those responsible emptied his checking account. They wrongfully appropriated up to 101,646 euros. This is the account given by the prosecutor, who is requesting five years in prison for friar Martín Alexis González and his right-hand man, Luis Carlos Rodríguez, for wrongfully appropriating 263,877 euros from religious individuals under their care with mental health problems.
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It all started when the religious members entered the Dominican residence El Vedat de Torrent (Valencia), where elderly friars live, who require specific care or cannot take care of themselves. When friar Martín, in charge of the residence, detected that they had health problems that implied a decline in their mental state, he made them sign a document in which he was authorized on their personal bank account, the one where the part of the pension that was automatically deposited into the residence’s common account would not go.
“The friars noticed that they had no money, that it was disappearing, or that they kept it in their room and then it was gone. It always happened with workers who had dementia or some type of mental illness,” says the complainant, a former collaborator at that residence. “One day, a priest told us they were leaving him without money. At first, we told him: ‘Come on, father, surely it’s just your imagination.’ Until one day he showed us the passbooks and we saw that they were taking all his money,” says a former worker of the residence.
“In a convent, there can be two types of funds: the official and the unofficial, because, who is going to get involved in a convent? Everyone pools their salary and the prior looks at the expenses, but he accounts for them. Here, no accounts were given or anything,” laments the person who reported these facts to the Civil Guard in 2023.
According to the prosecutor’s indictment, which EL PAÍS has accessed, “the accused (…), acting in collusion continuously over time, and taking advantage of the residents given their mental condition, proceeded with illicit financial benefit, as they withdrew variable amounts from the checking accounts of the resident priests, which were either sent, through different intermediaries, to accounts abroad, or incorporated into their own assets.”
There are dozens of bank transactions affecting at least five different people, from whom the two accomplices allegedly stole money. The earliest date back to 2021 and the latest were made in 2024. The Prosecutor’s Office maintains that these are variable amounts withdrawn from the victims’ accounts and that approximately coincide in time and amounts with those later deposited into one of the personal accounts of one of the accused.
Religious M. M. would have had 53,300 euros taken from him. Between January 2019 and February 2024, another had 101,646 euros disappear. The amounts that the Civil Guard has managed to verify total more than 263,000 euros. Part of the money was sent to accounts abroad, from Argentina or Colombia. Luis, the man who acted as friar Martín’s right-hand man, is a national of this country.
A common account
There are some transactions in a personal account of one of the accused with the concepts “Care admission cashier,” but the truth is that, according to the congregation’s statutes, all income intended for the care of the friars must be contributed to the congregation’s common account.
The complainant and the former worker who have confirmed the facts believe that the appropriation of money by these two people was not limited to what the prosecutor described, but that they also took cash that the religious members had in their rooms. “Another friar who kept a serious amount in a folder noticed that it disappeared from that folder. He asked the nurse: ‘Did you take money from me?’”
The person who ended up going to the Civil Guard recounts the situation that made them think it was widespread and unsustainable: “I grabbed the trunk, everything fell to the floor, and several envelopes with 50-euro bills spilled out, many, I didn’t stop to count them. A friar told me: ‘Ugh, this is what they take from us.’” They also claim that the now accused harassed other friars who were aware of the situation in the residence’s infirmary with the inmates.
Several of the affected have died; the others have not claimed the money that, according to the investigation, was appropriated by the people who were supposed to take care of them. Luis Carlos Rodríguez, whom the prosecution sees as an accomplice, has declined to make any comment to this newspaper. The Dominican order, to which the friar belongs and who has continued to serve during the period he has been investigated, limits itself to saying that the oral trial is scheduled for next November.
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