Eduardo García, 64 years old, got no benefit from playing dumb in the trial for a multimillion-dollar scam that took place two weeks ago at the Provincial Court of Madrid. In theory, he was supposed to be tried alongside his partner, Ana María Vicente Oset, 55 years old, popularly known as Anita la fantástica, the biggest scammer in Spain. But she did not show up, and the court issued a search and arrest warrant against her and declared her in rebellion. He has now been sentenced to six years in prison for a continued crime of fraud, breach of trust, and recidivism.
She (“multiple recidivist”) remains on the run. He was brought to the courtroom from the Basque Country, escorted by police and handcuffed, because he is serving a sentence there for another scam. And he had to face the charges alone. His defense consisted of saying that he was only in charge of the company’s logistics, that he did what Anita told him, who was the economist, the salesperson, and the one who handled contracts and finances. However, he appeared as the sole administrator of the company, a fake travel agency that allegedly worked with the largest tour operators in the world.
But many of those operations and messages revealed Eduardo’s full complicity and participation in a fraud consisting of selling fake trips for MotoGP championships and supposed cancellation insurance for the same. Between Eduardo and “the other person,” as Anita is referred to throughout a 46-page ruling, they scammed 730,000 euros from four people, the complainants. But it is estimated that they have accumulated debts of up to seven million euros with similar deceptions, pretending to live the high life and making their victims believe they mingled with the crème de la crème of society.
“The evidence allows us to consider it unequivocally proven that the accused, in concert with the person against whom no oral trial has been held due to unknown whereabouts, committed the proven acts by generating (through the company AUPA TRAVEL, SL, of which the accused was the sole administrator) an artificial commercial activity on various products (trips, stays in hotels, tickets to sporting events),” the court states in the ruling. “Products that they offered to the victims, who paid the indicated prices, believing they could enjoy them when, in reality, these were nonexistent products,” it adds.
According to the ruling, Eduardo “assigns the commercial, administrative, accounting tasks related to product marketing, branch openings, and contracting to the other person, among other reasons, because the other person was an economics graduate and auditor, so she not only handled the commercial part but also the entire economic part,” it notes. But it concludes: “The supposed ignorance invoked by the accused regarding the conduct attributed exclusively to the other person, who would be his partner, is not upheld, as described by various conviction rulings issued by other courts against both,” it points out.
According to the court’s findings, it has been proven that “the accused, in collusion with the absent accused, simulated being in the process of collecting compensation from insurers (procedures that turned out to be fictitious) and convinced the victims that they had to make payments necessary for cancellation expenses and income tax, managing to get them to make various payments for these concepts,” it details.
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Meanwhile, Anita la fantástica remains at large.
