The case against the large mobile repair franchise was reopened after Huawei appeared

One day after the National Police reported the dismantling in Malaga of “a criminal network dedicated to the repair of mobile phones with pirated parts imported from Asia”, the lawyers of Manzana Rota, the company on which this investigation has gravitated, They wanted to deny the accusations made and criticized the results of a “prospective investigation” that they consider “disproportionate”. To emphasize that “the case was filed with the support of the Prosecutor's Office and was reopened when Huawei appeared” as a justified party.

The lawyer Raquel Rodríguez, who together with her partner Álvaro Morales defends the interests of this Malaga firm with more than 35 stores in fifteen provinces, explained to this newspaper that the investigation, which began at the end of 2020, was dismissed by the judicial authority after presenting a letter in which he questioned the approaches of those responsible for the case.

“They highlighted the absence of packaging or wrappers [packaging] in which the original articles usually go, when it came to reconditioned or remanufactured products that have undergone a recycling process,” said the lawyer, who added that it is “as if you are leaving to a scrapyard and you take a part for an engine”.

Rodríguez remarked that he provided a “quite extensive” document in court in which “the origin of the parts used in the repair of the telephones was accredited”; as well as a report from the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office sent after a consultation by the company on the use of reconditioned parts. In the document, according to the defense, it was answered that, “since they were components that had already been released on the market, the brand had achieved the benefit it intended to obtain, and, therefore, the activity was lawful”.

This legal approval, yes, depended on the client being warned that the replacement element was not new, something that the legal representatives of Manzana Rota affirm that it was done. “In the Internet pages in which the company advertises, it can be verified that it says that the parts are not original. And it is reflected in the document that customers who take a mobile phone to any of the stores must sign.. Therefore, the consumer was fully informed,” he said..

At this point, it must be remembered that the crimes for which the 47 detainees are accused are belonging to a criminal organization and against industrial property.. The agents in charge of the case considered that they could also have incurred in an alleged fraud, but in the end this charge could not be charged to them because it is considered that, with the low prices offered for parts for leading brands, the client had to assume that supposedly they were false.

The file of the case had the support of the Public Ministry up to three times, stated Raquel Rodríguez, who stressed that it was reopened when Huawei, the Chinese mobile telephony giant, appeared in the case as an affected party. “With some powers that I have discussed, and for which I have just submitted a letter requesting the annulment of the proceedings, he resorts, alluding to the fact that the possibility of exercising actions had not been offered to the possible injured parties and he obtains the lifting of the file,” he explains. the lawyer, who does not hide her surprise at the fact that the Prosecutor's Office changed its line of action and decided to endorse the initiative of the representatives of the multinational.

The judicial authority “issued an order declaring the secrecy of the proceedings” and “began a prospective investigation, which is prohibited by law, and official letters were requested from Customs or the Tax Agency”. The lawyer considers that the objective was to substantiate a money laundering charge that ultimately did not prosper. And he criticized the “disproportionate” action, since the majority of those arrested “are the store clerks and the technicians who repair the phones.”. “There is a case of a detainee who had been in the company for a week,” he said..

Rodríguez is convinced that everything will be cleared up, although she regrets the reputational damage caused to Manzana Rota, and recalls that the subsequent possibilities of claiming damages are limited. This condition to the image, he considers, can be increased by the judicial ordeal that can mean that a separate room is opened for each of the stores, as he maintains is the intention.

The investigation

The Malaga Provincial Police Station reported that the investigations by agents of Group II of Economic Crimes and the Asset Location and Assets Investigation Group (IPLA) revealed that the investigated stores allegedly used unofficial spare parts for their repairs, mainly from China and Hong Kong. Fact that, according to affirms, the clients did not know.

The aforementioned source specified that an initial inspection was carried out in a Malaga-based company that distributes such components nationwide, located in the Villa Rosa industrial estate in the capital, which in turn is a supplier to the leading smartphone repair firm..

The agents found connections between the leaders of both companies and began economic and patrimonial investigations that managed to connect both companies, their owners and an extensive network of owned and franchised stores with branches in all the provinces of Andalusia and other regions of the country..

They carried out discreet incursions into industrial estates, observing how in some warehouses there were exposed materials that, even with great subtlety due to the slight changes made to the registered designs, reproduced the trademark registrations without authorization, indicated the National Police, which pointed out that in the various procedures carried out included representatives of the affected brands.

The exhaustive analysis of economic information confirmed that the supplier company made its acquisitions in Asia and then distributed the parts to the parent company and all its branches in Spain.. “The expert reports issued by the Scientific Police confirmed that the components used in the repairs were counterfeits”.

At this stage of the investigation, the agents located and identified the leaders of the plot, and made a total of 47 detainees, including the leaders of the two companies under suspicion.. The arrests and inspections spread to all the Andalusian provinces, Murcia, Badajoz or Alicante; being Malaga, with more than 30, the one that accumulated the highest percentage.

During the records of the Rotten operation, as the action was baptized, 14,000 supposedly counterfeit spare parts were intervened, mainly screens, cameras, batteries, among other components, “which would turn out to be copies practically identical in appearance to the originals, except in relation to The product quality”. These allegedly reproduced without authorization the registered designs of well-known telephone brands, such as Apple, in violation of industrial property rights.

Manzana Rota is considered one of the leading companies in the smartphone repair sector in Spain and is structured with a model of low-cost franchises spread across much of the national territory. As it highlights on its website, it opened its first physical store in 2013 with the hook of fixing iPhones in an hour. “We went from two in January 2016, to 15 in early 2017, and ending 2018 with 35.”