The defense of Jonathan Andic, in the hands of criminal lawyer Cristóbal Martell, presented this Thursday the appeal against the order that a little over a week ago ordered provisional detention avoidable with bail for the son of the founder of Mango, accused of the homicide of his father. In the document, accessed by EL PAÍS, his lawyers request, among other things, the annulment of the precautionary measures agreed by the judge of Martorell (Barcelona) after his arrest. At the request of the Prosecutor’s Office, the judge ordered imprisonment under bail of one million euros and also imposed other measures: withdrawal of the passport, prohibition to leave Spain, and obligation to appear weekly in court. The defense has chosen to directly file an appeal before the Barcelona Court of Appeal, a higher body, and not a reform appeal before the same judge.
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The 27-page document laments that Isak Andic’s eldest son is suffering a “premature social condemnation” and denounces the “careful drip in the leaking of the lines of the police investigation.” According to the defense, his arrest was “completely unnecessary,” since he had already testified before the Mossos and had made himself available to the court.
Martell and his team try to refute one by one the seven indications presented by the Mossos (and assumed by the judge) in the investigation of the incident. One of the most relevant is the three previous visits that, in the week of the accident, he made to the Montserrat mountain, where his father fell at noon on December 14, 2024. The lawyers claim that there were not three visits, but only two: December 7 and December 10, since there is no record of the vehicle’s location on the 8th. According to the Mossos, on the 10th Jonathan made a route, by time and geolocation, almost identical to the one he would make alone with his father four days later. The defense, however, argues that he gave up the hike “due to adverse weather conditions.”
Another of the indications has to do with the fact that, during an alleged three-day trip to Quito (Ecuador) in March 2025, Jonathan Andic lost (due to theft) his iPhone 14. Investigators suspect that he deleted messages with his father from that phone and that, when he changed devices, he did not recover them. The order points out that this alleged loss occurred when the reopening of the judicial case was made public by the media.
Jonathan Andic’s lawyer also responds to this issue explaining that he had already requested, in December, the change of mobile phone. The request was made, according to the defense, on December 27, that is, two weeks after his father’s death. Due to simple “indolence,” Isak Andic’s eldest son did not pick up the new device and only did so when he was forced to after suffering a “theft” in Quito. The document defends the reality of that “lightning” trip to Ecuador for a meeting that required “his physical presence.” The defense also assures that the Mossos’ claim that the phone’s content was deleted “is not accurate.” The police could not recover the backup copies of the WhatsApp conversations, but “it is not recorded” that Jonathan had those backup copies.
The defense reproduces in its document Jonathan Andic’s conversation with the Generalitat emergency phone 112, where he called after the incident. “I need help. My father has fallen, we are in Collbató, he has fallen.” When the operator asks if he fell or tripped, Jonathan Andic responds: “I think he fell off a cliff, please send someone, send an ambulance.” A version, they insist, that corresponds with what he later declared to the Mossos.
Isak Andic died on a hike along the camí de les Feixades, which leads to Montserrat. He was only with his son, with whom, according to the investigation, he had agreed to talk about the problems that strained the father-son relationship. The investigating judge holds that there is evidence that Jonathan participated in an “active and premeditated” manner in his father’s death. And points to a bad personal relationship related to money as a motive. Andic’s defense appeal includes statements from the investigated’s sisters, his uncle and Isak’s brother, Toni Ruiz, his secretary, and also friends of the deceased, all of whom deny that alleged bad relationship.
The Mossos d’Esquadra have investigated the businessman’s death in the mountain for almost a year and a half. Named the Monestir case, the Catalan police have exploited all the clues they found to try to clarify what happened. Among the gathered indications, the statements of the psychotherapists who treated father and son, as well as the use of technology, have been fundamental. Thanks to Jonathan Andic’s mobile phone and his car’s license plate, investigators maintain that the eldest son of Mango’s founder went three days, in a week before the accident, to the camí de les Feixades (December 7, 8, and 10). They also point out that the last of the trips practically coincides with the route that on December 14 ended abruptly, barely 10 minutes after it started, with Isak Andic’s fall off a cliff of almost a hundred meters that caused his death.
After the father’s death, the will divided the fortune equally among the three children, Jonathan, Judith, and Sarah. Additionally, Jonathan assumed the vice presidency of the company, which he temporarily resigned from on Tuesday. In an open letter, the investigated stated that he did so for the good of the company. “I need to concentrate all my energy on proving my innocence,” he wrote in the letter, in which he denounced a “public narrative” based on a “partial, decontextualized, and distorted vision” that has generated a “perception of guilt.”
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