Justice forces to indemnify one of the defendants of the Philatelic Forum with €20,000
The State will have to indemnify the ex-counselor of the Philatelic Forum Francisco López Gilarte with 20,000 euros. The Prosecutor's Office even requested 15 years in prison for him for his alleged participation in “the biggest fraud in the history of Spain”, but after being acquitted of all crimes in 2018, the National Court sets this compensation for the damage caused. According to sources from his defense, López Gilarte will now appeal the sentence before the Supreme Court so that the final compensation exceeds 3.6 million euros.
The former director of the Philatelic Forum denounces for this an “abnormal operation of the Administration of Justice” and points to four reasons: the 71 days that he spent in provisional prison, the delays suffered by the investigation, the repercussions that it caused in his patrimony and the ” moral damage”.
The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who was then acting as a magistrate of the National Court, agreed to the provisional detention of López Gilarte a day later: “Not only for being part of the board of directors of Fórum Filatélico SA, but also for participating in direct commercial management that necessarily implies knowledge of the product and its characteristics”, he warned in his resolution. “Within the criminal plot, significant contributions were obtained from clients to whom they delivered lots of highly overvalued stamps”.
That decision kept the former counselor behind bars until July 21, 2006, when it was agreed to release him on bail of 60,000 euros and on the condition that he appear before the court periodically. The investigators maintained their thesis that he was one of the main perpetrators of the pyramid scheme and, more than 10 years later, López Gilarte ended up sitting on the bench of the National Court as a defendant: the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor requested 15 years in prison for him for the crimes of continued aggravated fraud, punishable insolvency and continued falsification of company accounts.
The number of those affected by the pyramid scheme already exceeded 269,000 people. Between 2000 and 2005 alone, the massive fundraising had reached 11,200 million, and the Prosecutor's Office placed López Gilarte in the third step of the plot, just behind the president himself, Francisco Briones, for whom he claimed 27 years prison, and the director general, Antonio Merino, who was facing 16 other. The prosecutor ended up lowering his indictment in the final stretch of the trial and managed to get the latter two convicted, but in the case of López Gilarte, the National Court agreed to his acquittal on July 13, 2018..
The magistrates highlighted that the counselor himself had invested more than 67,000 euros in the company and limited his decision-making power: “It is necessary to show the reserve with which accounting manipulations were made, which is inferred from some internal messages”. “It has not been proven that they were aware of the pyramidal nature of the Forum or that the value of the stamps did not respond to the lists made by the president or to the money invested by clients”.
The Supreme Court confirmed the acquittal of López Gilarte in March 2020. After more than a decade defending himself, the counselor then decided to go on the attack and the National Court has just agreed with him: “Recognize in favor of the plaintiff a total compensation of 20,000 euros”, the magistrates agree in a sentence of June 29 to which El Confidencial has had access. López Gilarte will now appeal to the Supreme Court and trusts that it will agree with him again. This time, to settle accounts.